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I
THE CITIZEN'S LIBRARY
OF
ECONOMICS, POLITICS, AND
SOCIOLOGY
EDITED BY
RICHARD T. ELY, Ph.D., LL.D.
DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND
POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF
WISCONSIN
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
T»^^^
•S ^^ o
THE CITIZEN'S LIBRARY
DEMOCRACY AND
SOCIAL ETHICS
BY
JANE ADDAMS
HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1902
All rights reserved
•Thg^y^o
C'^d
THE CITIZEN'S LIBRARY
DEMOCRACY AND
SOCIAL ETHICS
BY
JANE ADDAMS
HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1902
All rights reserved
^3
Copyright, i9<»f
Bv THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped March, 1902.
liJortoooti ^regg
J. S.Cushing& Co.- Berwick & smith
Norwood Mass. U.S. A.
Co JH. E. S>.
PREFATORY NOTE
The following pages present the substance
of a course of twelve lectures on " Democ-
racy and Social Ethics " which have been
delivered at various colleges and university
extension centres.
In putting them into the form of a book,
no attempt has been made to change the
somewhat informal style used in speaking.
The "we" and "us" which originally re-
ferred to the speaker and her audience are
merely extended to possible readers.
Acknowledgment for permission to re-
print is extended to The Atlantic Monthly^
The International Journal of Ethics^ The
American Journal of Sociology^ and to The
Commons,
vu
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGB
Introduction ........ i
CHAPTER II
Charitable Effort • ^3
CHAPTER III
Filial Relations 71
CHAPTER IV
Household Adjustment 102
CHAPTER V
Industrial Amelioration 137
CHAPTER VI
Educational Methods 178
)
CHAPTER VII
Political Reform (221
lY.
INDEX 279
ix
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL
ETHICS
CHAPTER I
Introduction
It is well to remind ourselves, from time to
time, that " Ethics " is but another word for
"righteousness," that for which many men
and women of every generation have hun-
gered and thirsted, and without which life
becomes meaningless.
Certain forms of personal righteousness
have become to a majority of the commu-
nity almost automatic. It is as easy for most
of us to keep from stealing our dinners as it
is to digest them, and there is quite as much
voluntary morality involved in one process as
in the other. To steal would be for us to fall
i
I sadly below the standard of habit and expec-
tation which makes virtue easy. In the same
way we have been carefully reared to a sense
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
of family obligation, to be kindly and consid-
erate to the members of our own households,
and to feel responsible for their well-being.
As the rules of conduct have become estab-
lished in regard to our self-development and
our families, so they have been in regard to
limited circles of friends. If the fulfilment
of these claims were all that a righteous life
required, the hunger and thirst would be
stilled for many good men and women, and
the clew of right living would lie easily in
their hands.
But we all know that each generation has
its own test, the contemporaneous and cur-
rent standard by which alone it can ade-
quately judge of its own moral achievements,
and that it may not legitimately use a previ-
ous and less vigorous test. The advanced
test must indeed include that which has
already been attained ; but if it includes no
more, we shall fail to go forward, thinking ,]
complacently that we have " arrived " when
in reality we have not yet started.
To attain individual morality in an age
INTRODUCTION
demanding social morality, to pride one's
self on the results of personal effort when
the time demands social adjustment, is ut-
terly to fail to apprehend the situation.
It is perhaps significant that a German
critic has of late reminded us that the one
test which the most authoritative and dra-
matic portrayal of the Day of Judgment
offers, is the social test. The stern questions
are not in regard to personal and family rela-
tions, but did ye visit the poor, the criminal,
the sick, and did ye feed the hungry ?
All about us are men and women who
have become unhappy in regard to their atti-
tude toward the social order itself; toward
the dreary round of uninteresting work, the
pleasures narrowed down to those of appe-
I tite, the declining consciousness of brain
power, and the lack of mental food which
characterizes the lot of the large propor-
^* tion of their fellow-citizens. These men and
women have caught a moral challenge raised
by the exigencies of contemporaneous life;
some are bewildered, others who are denied
3
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
the relief which sturdy action brings are
even seeking an escape, but all are increas-
ingly anxious concerning their actual rela-
tions to the basic organization of society.
The test which they would apply to their
conduct is a social test. They fail to be
content with the fulfilment of their family
and personal obligations, and find them-
selves striving to respond to a new demand
involving a social obligation; they have
become conscious of another requirement,
and the contribution they would make is
toward a code of social ethics. The con-
ception of life which they hold has not yet
expressed itself in social changes or legal
enactment, but rather in a mental attitude of
maladjustment, and in a sense of divergence
between their consciences and their conduct.
They desire both a clearer definition of the
code of morality adapted to present day
demands and a part in its fulfilment, both a
creed and a practice of social morality. In
the perplexity of this intricate situation at
least one thing is becoming clear : if the latter
4 I
J
INTRODUCTION
day moral ideal is in reality that of a social
morality, it is inevitable that those who
desire it must be brought in contact with the
moral experiences of the many in order to
procure an adequate social motive.
These men and women have realized this
and have disclosed the fact in their eager-
ness for a wider acquaintance with and par-
ticipation in the life about them. They
believe that experience gives the easy and
trustworthy impulse toward right action in
the broad as well as in the narrow relations.
We may indeed imagine many of them say-
ing : " Cast our experiences in a larger mould
if our lives are to be animated by the larger
social aims. We have met the obligations
of our family life, not because we had made
resolutions to that end, but spontaneously,
because of a common fund of memories and
affections, from which the obligation natu-
rally develops, and we see no other way in
which to prepare ourselves for the larger
social duties." Such a demand is reason-
able, for by our daily experience we have
5
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
discovered that we cannot mechanically hold
up a moral standard, then jump at it in rare
moments of exhilaration when we have the
strength for it, but that even as the ideal
itself must be a rational development of life,
so the strength to attain it must be secured
from interest in life itself. We slowly learn
that life consists of processes as well as
results, and that failure may come quite as
easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's
method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We
are thus brought to a conception of Democ-
l/ racy not merely as a sentiment which de-
sires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a
creed which believes in the essential dig-
nity and equality of all men, but as that
which affords a rule of living as well as a
test of faith.
We are learning that a standard of social
I ethics is not attained by travelling a seques-
tered byway, but by mixing on the thronged
and common road where all must turn out
v"^ v| for one another, and at least see the size of
one another's burdens. To follow the path
6
INTRODUCTION
of social morality results perforce in the
temper if not the practice of the demo-
cratic spirit, for it implies that diversified
human experience and resultant sympathy
which are the foundation and guarantee of
Democracy.
There are many indications that this con-
ception of Democracy is growing among us.
We have come to have an enormous interest
in human life as such, accompanied by con-
fidence in its essential soundness. We do
not believe that genuine experience can
lead us astray any more than scientific data
can.
We realize, too, that social perspective and
sanity of judgment come only from contact
with social experience ; that such contact is
the surest corrective of opinions concerning
the social order, and concerning efforts, how-
ever humble, for its improvement. Indeed, it
is a consciousness of the illuminating and
dynamic value of this wider an,d *rAore
thorough human^ experience Which explains
in no small degree that new curiosity regard-
7
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
ing human life which has more of a moral
basis than an intellectual one.
The newspapers, in a frank reflection of
popular demand, exhibit an omniverous
curiosity equally insistent upon the trivial
and the important. They are perhaps the
most obvious manifestations of that desire
to know, that "What is this?" and "Why
do you do that ? " of the child. The first
dawn of the social consciousness takes this
form, as the dawning intelligence of the
child takes the form of constant question
and insatiate curiosity.
Literature, too, portrays an equally absorb-
ing though better adjusted desire to know
all kinds of life. The popular books are
the novels, dealing with life under all pos-
sible conditions, and they are widely read
not only because they are entertaining, but
also because they in a measure satisfy an
unformulated belief that to see farther, to
know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way,
is a preparation for better social adjustment
— for the remedying of social ills.
8
J^
INTRODUCTION
Doubtless one under the conviction of
sin in regard to social ills finds a vague
consolation in reading about the lives of
the poor, and derives a sense of complicity
in doing good. He likes to feel that he
knows about social wrongs even if he ^I^*^
does not remedy them, and in a very
genuine sense there is a foundation for'
this belief.
Partly through this wide reading of
human life, we find in ourselves a new
afiinity for all men, which probably never
existed in the world before. Evil itself does
not shock us as it once did, and we count
only that man merciful in whom we rerog^-
nize_gLnjuJiderstanding of the criminal. We
have learned as common knowledge that
much of the insensibility and hardness of
the world is due to the lack of imagination
which prevents a realization of the expe-
riences of other people. Already there is
a conviction that we are under a moral
obligation in choosing our experiences, since
the result of those experiences must ulti-
9
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
mately determine our understanding of life.
We know instinctively that if we grow con-
temptuous of our fellows, and consciously
limit our intercourse to certain kinds of
people whom we have previously decided
to respect, we not only tremendously cir-
cumscribe our range of life, but limit the
scope of our ethics.
We can recall among the selfish people
of our acquaintance at least one common
characteristic, — the conviction that they are
different from other men and women, that
they need peculiar consideration because
they are more sensitive or more refined.
Such people " refuse to be bound by any
relation save the personally luxurious ones
of love and admiration, or the identity of
political opinion, or religious creed." We
have learned to recognize them as selfish,
although we blame them not for the will
which chooses to be selfish, but for a nar-
rowness of interest which deliberately selects
its experience within a limited sphere, and
we say that they illustrate the danger of
lO
INTRODUCTION
concentrating the mind on narrow and un-
progressive issues.
We know, at last, that we can only dis-
cover truth by a rational and democratic /
interest in life, and to give truth complete
social expression is the endeavor upon which
we are entering. Thus the iHpptifir,a.tinn \
with the common lot which is the essential ir/*
idea of Democracy becomes the source and \
expression of social ethics. It is as though I
we thiFsteH to drink at the great wells of
human experience, because we knew that a
daintier or less potent draught would not
carry us to the end of the journey, going
forward as we must in the heat and jostle
of the crowd.
The six following chapters are studies of
various types and groups who are being
impelled by the newer conception of Democ-
racy to an acceptance of social obligations
involving in each instance a new line of
conduct. No attempt is made to reach a ^
conclusion, nor to offer advice beyond the
assumption that the cure for the ills of .
II
/
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
Democracy is more Democracy, but the
quite unlooked-for result of the studies
would seem to indicate that while the strain
and perplexity of the situation is felt most
keenly by the educated and self-conscious
members of the community, the tentative and
actual attempts at adjustment are largely
coming through those who are simpler and
less analytical.
12
CHAPTER II
Charitable Effort
All those hints and glimpses of a larger
and more satisfying democracy, which
literature and our own hopes supply, have
a tendency to slip away from us and to
leave us sadly unguided and perplexed
when we attempt to act upon them.
Our conceptions of morality, as all our
other ideas, pass through a course of devel-
opment ; the difficulty comes in adjusting our
conduct, which has become hardened into
customs and habits, to these changing moral
conceptions. When this adjustment is not
made, we suffer from the strain and indeci-
sion of believing one hypothesis and acting
upon another.
Probably there is no relation in life
which our democracy is changing more
13
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
rapidly than the charitable relation — that
relation which obtains between benefactor
and beneficiary; at the same time there is
no point of contact in our modern experi-
ence which reveals so clearly the lack of
that equality which democracy implies. We
have reached the moment when democracy
hasf made such inroads upon this relation-
ship, that the complacency of the old-
fashioned charitable man is gone forever;
while, at the same time, the very need and
existence of charity, denies us the consola-
tion and freedom which democracy will at
last give.
It is quite obvious that the ethics of none
of us are clearly defined, and we are con-
tinually obliged to act in circles of habit,
based upon convictions which we no longer
hold. Thus our estimate of the effect
of environment and social conditions has
doubtless shifted faster than our methods of
administrating charity have changed. \ For-
merly when it was believed that poverty was
synonymous with vice and laziness, and that
14
CHARITABLE EFFORT
the prosperous man was the righteous man,
charity was administered harshly with a
good conscience; for the charitable agent
really blamed the individual for his pov-
erty, and the very fact of his own superior
prosperity gave him a certain consciousness
of superior morality. We have learned
since that time to measure by other stand-
ards, and have ceased to accord to the
money-earning capacity exclusive respect;
while it is still rewarded out of all propor-
tion to any other, its possession is by no
means assumed to imply the possession of
the highest moral qualities. \ We have
learned to judge men by their social virtues
as well as by their business capacity, by
their devotion to intellectual and disinter-
ested aims, and by their public spirit, and
we naturally resent being obliged to judge
poor people so solely upon the industrial
side. Our democratic instinct instantly
takes alarm. It is largely in this modern
tendency to judge all men by one demo-
cratic standard, while the old charitable/
15
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
attitude commonly allowed the use of two
standards, that much of the difficulty ad-
heres. We know that unceasing bodily toil
becomes wearing and brutalizing, and our
position is totally untenable if we judge
large numbers of our fellows solely upon
their success in maintaining it.
The daintily clad charitable visitor who
steps into the little house made untidy by
the vigorous efforts of her hostess, the
washerwoman, is no longer sure of her su-
periority to the latter; she recognizes that
her hostess after all represents social value
and industrial use, as over against her own
'parasitic cleanliness and a social standing
attained only through status.
The only families who apply for aid to
the charitable agencies are those who have
come to grief on the industrial side ; it may
be through sickness, through loss of work,
or for other guiltless and inevitable reasons ;
but the fact remains that they are industri-
ally ailing, and must be bolstered and helped
into industrial health. The charity visitor,
i6
CHARITABLE EFFORT
let US assume, is a young college woman,
well-bred and open-minded ; when she visits
the family assigned to her, she is often em-
barrassed to find herself obliged to lay all
the stress of her teaching and advice upon
the industrial virtues, and to treat the mem-
bers of the family almost exclusively as
factors in the industrial system. She in-
sists that they must work and be self-
supporting, that the most dangerous of all
situations is idleness, that seeking one's
own pleasure, while ignoring claims and
responsibilities, is the most ignoble of
actions. The members of her assigned
family may have other charms and virtues
— they may possibly be kind and consider-
ate of each other, generous to their friends,
but it is her business to stick to the indus-
trial side. As she daily holds up these
standards, it often occurs to the mind of
the sensitive visitor, whose conscience has
been made tender by much talk of brother-
hood and equality, that she has no right
to say these things ; that her untrained
c 17
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
hands are no more fitted to cope with
actual conditions than those of her broken-
down family.
The grandmother of the charity visitor
could have done the industrial preaching
very well, because she did have the indus-
trial virtues and housewifely training. In
a generation our experiences have changed,
and our views with them ; but we still keep
on in the old methods, which could be ap-
plied when our consciences were in line with
them, but which are daily becoming more
difficult as we divide up into people who
work with their hands and those who do
not. The charity visitor belonging to the
latter class is perplexed by recognitions and
suggestions which the situation forces upon
her. Our democracy has taught us to apply
our moral teaching all around, and the
moralist is rapidly becoming so sensitive
that when his life does not exemplify his
ethical convictions, he finds it difficult to
preach.
Added to this is a consciousness, in the
i8
CHARITABLE EFFORT
mind of the visitor, of a genuine misunder-
standing of her motives by the recipients of
her charity, and by their neighbors. Let
us take a neighborhood of poor people, and
test their ethical standards by those of the
charity visitor, who comes with the best
desire in the world to help them out of their
distress. A^ most striking incongruity, at ,
once apparent, is the difference between the /I
emotional kindness_with which relief is given 1
by one poor neighbor to another poor neigh-/
bor, and the guarded care with which relief
is given by a charity visitor to a charity
recipient. The neighborhood mind is at
once confronted not only by the difference
of method, but by an absolute clashing of
two ethical standards.
A very little familiarity with the poor
districts of any city is sufficient to show how
primitive and genuine are the neighborly
relations. There is the greatest willingness
to lend or borrow anything, and all the resi-
dents of the given tenement know the most
intimate family affairs of all the others.
19
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
The fact that the economic condition of all
alike is on a most precarious level makes
the ready outflow of sympathy and material
assistance the most natural thing in the
world. There are numberless instances of
self-sacrifice quite unknown in the circles
where greater economic advantages make
that kind of intimate knowledge of one's
neighbors impossible. An Irish family in
which the man has lost his place, and the
woman is struggling to eke out the scanty
savings by day's work, will take in the widow
and her five children who have been turned
into the street, without a moment's reflec-
tion upon the physical discomforts involved.
The most maligned landlady who lives in
the house with her tenants is usually ready
to lend a scuttle full of coal to one of them
who may be out of work, or to share her
supper. A woman for whom the writer
had long tried in vain to find work failed
to appear at the appointed time when em-
ployment was secured at last. Upon inves-
tigation it transpired that a neighbor further
20
CHARITABLE EFFORT
down the street was taken ill, that the chil-
dren ran for the family friend, who went of
course, saying simply when reasons for her
non-appearance were demanded, " It broke
me heart to leave the place, but what could
I do ? " A woman whose husband was sent
up to the city prison for the maximum
term, just three months, before the birth of
her child found herself penniless at the
end of that time, having gradually sold her
supply of household furniture. She took
refuge with a friend whom she supposed
to be living in three rooms in another part
of town. When she arrived, however, she
discovered that her friend's husband had
been out of work so long that they had
been reduced to living in one room. The
friend, however, took her in, and the friend's
husband was obliged to sleep upon a bench
in the park every night for a week, which
he did uncomplainingly if not cheerfully.
Fortunately it was summer, " and it only
rained one night." The writer could not
discover from the young mother that she had
21
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
any special claim upon the " friend " beyond
the fact that they had formerly worked to-
gether in the same factory. The husband
she had never seen until the night of her
arrival, when he at once went forth in search
of a midwife who would consent to come
upon his promise of future payment.
to pity, tbf^ impil]^<^ fn-^iiij-^HiQ fellows, served
man^at a. yf^^Y f^arly pprind^ as a rude rule
ornght and wrong. There is no doubt
that this rude rule still holds among many
people with whom charitable agencies are
brought into contact, and that their ideas
of right and wrong are quite honestly out-
raged by the methods of these agencies.
When they see the delay and caution with
which relief is given, it does not appear
to them a conscientious scruple, but as the
cold and calculating action of a selfish man.
It is not the aid that they are accustomed
to receive from their neighbors, and they
do not understand why the impulse which
drives people to " be good to the poor "
22
CHARITABLE EFFORT
should be so severely supervised. They feel,
remotely, that the charity visitor is moved
by motives that are alien and unreal. They
may be superior motives, but they are dif-
ferent, and they are "agin nature." They
cannot comprehend why a person whose
intellectual perceptions are stronger than
his natural impulses, should go into charity
work at all. The only man they are ac-
customed to see whose intellectual percep-
tions are stronger than his tenderness of
heart, is the selfish and avaricious man
who is frankly " on the make." If the charity
visitor is such a person, why does she pre-
tend to like the poor.?* Why does she not
go into business at once ?
We may say, of course, that it is a primi-
tive view of life, which thus confuses intel-
lectuality and business ability; but it is a
view quite honestly held by many poor peo-
ple who are obliged to receive charity from
time to time. In moments of indignation
the poor have been known to say : " What do
you want, anyway ? If you have nothing to
23
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
give us, why not let us alone and stop your
questionings and investigations ? " " They
investigated me for three weeks, and in the
end gave me nothing but a black character,"
a little woman has been heard to assert.
This indignation, which is for the most part
taciturn, and a certain kindly contempt for
her abilities, often puzzles the charity visitor.
The latter may be explained by the standard
of worldly success which the visited families
hold. Success does not ordinarily go, in the
minds of the poor, with charity and kind-
heartedness, but rather with the opposite
qualities. The rich landlord is he who col-
lects with sternness, who accepts no excuse,
and will have his own. There are moments
of irritation and of real bitterness against
him, but there is still admiration, because he
is rich and successful. The good-natured
landlord, he who pities and spares his
poverty-pressed tenants, is seldom rich. He
often lives in the back of his house, which
he has owned for a long time, perhaps has
inherited ; but he has been able to accumu-
24
CHARITABLE EFFORT
late little. He commands the genuine love
and devotion of many a poor soul, but he
is treated with a certain lack of respect. .->,v.«'*'^^
In one sense he is a failure. The charity
visitor, just because she is a person who con-
cerns herself with the poor, receives a certain
amount of this good-natured and kindly con-
tempt, sometimes real affection, but little
genuine respect. The poor are accustomed
to help each other and to respond accord-
ing to their kindliness ; but when it comes
to worldly judgment, they use industrial suc-
cess as the sole standard. In the case of
the charity visitor who has neither natural
kindness nor dazzling riches, they are de-
prived of both standards, and they find it
of course utterly impossible to judge of the
motive of organized charity.
Even those of us who feel most sorely the
need of more order in altruistic effort and
see the end to be desired, find something
^ distasteful in the juxtaposition of the words
i " organized " and " charity." We say in
defence that we are striving to turn this
25
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
emotion into a motive, that pity is capricious,
and not to be depended on ; that we mean
to give it the dignity of conscious duty.
But at bottom we distrust a little a scheme
which substitutes a theory of social conduct
' for the natural promptings of the heart, even
although we appreciate the complexity of the
situation. The poor man who has fallen into
( distress, when he first asks aid, instinctively
expects tenderness, consideration, and forgive-
ness. If it is the first time, it has taken him
long to make up his mind to take the step.
He comes somewhat bruised and battered,
and instead of being met with warmth of
heart and sympathy, he is at once chilled by
an investigation and an intimation that he
ought to work. He does not recognize the
disciplinary aspect of the situation.
The only really popular charity is that of
the visiting nurses, who by virtue of their
professional training render services which
may easily be interpreted into sympathy and
kindness, ministering as they do to obvious
needs which do not require investigation.
26
CHARITABLE EFFORT
The state of mind which an investigation
arouses on both sides is most unfortunate;
but the perplexity and clashing of different
standards, with the consequent misunder-
standings, are not so bad as the moral dete-
rioration which is almost sure to follow.
When the agent or visitor appears among
the poor, and they discover that under cer-
tain conditions food and rent and medical
aid are dispensed from some unknown
source, every man, woman, and child is
quick to learn what the conditions may be,
and to follow them. Though in their eyes
a glass of beer is quite right and proper
when taken as any self-respecting man
should take it ; though they know that
cleanliness is an expensive virtue which can
be required of few ; though they realize that
saving is well-nigh impossible when but a few
cents can be laid by at a time ; though their
feeling for the church may be something
quite elusive of definition and quite apart
from daily living : to the visitor they gravely
laud temperance and cleanliness and thrift
27
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and religious observance. The deception
in the first instances arises from a wonder-
ing inability to understand the ethical ideals
which can require such impossible virtues,
and from an innocent desire to please. It
is easy to trace the development of the
mental suggestions thus received. When
A discovers that B, who is very little worse
off than he, receives good things from an
inexhaustible supply intended for the poor
at large, he feels that he too has a claim for
his share, and step by step there is developed
the competitive spirit which so horrifies
charity visitors when it shows it.self in
a tendency to " work " the relief -giving
agencies.
The most serious effect upon the poor
comes when dependence upon the chari-
table society is substituted for the natural
outgoing of human love and sympathy,
which, happily, we all possess in some de-
gree. The spontaneous impulse to sit up
all night with the neighbor's sick child is
turned into righteous indignation against
28
CHARITABLE EFFORT
the district nurse, because she goes home
at six o'clock, and doesn't do it herself. Or
the kindness which would have prompted
the quick purchase of much needed medi-
cine is transformed into a voluble scoring
of the dispensary, because it gives prescrip-
tions and not drugs ; and " who can get
well on a piece of paper ? "
If a poor woman knows that her neigh-
bor next door has no shoes, she is quite
willing to lend her own, that her neighbor
may go decently to mass, or to work; for
she knows the smallest item about the
scanty wardrobe, and cheerfully helps out.
When the charity visitor comes in, all the
neighbors are baffled as to what her circum-
stances may be. They know she does not
need a new pair of shoes, and rather suspect
that she has a dozen pairs at home; which,
indeed, she sometimes has. They imagine
untold stores which they may call upon,
and her most' generous gift is considered
niggardly, compared with what she might
do. She ought to get new shoes for the
29
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
family all round, " she sees well enough that
they need them." It is no more than the
neighbor herself would do, has practically
done, when she lent her own shoes. The
charity visitor has broken through the
natural rule of giving, which, in a primitive
society, is bounded only by the need of the
recipient and the resources of the giver;
and she gets herself into untold trouble
when she is judged by the ethics of that
primitive society.
The neighborhood understands the selfish
rich people who stay in their own part of
town, where all their associates have shoes
and other things. Such people don't bother
themselves about the poor; they are like
the rich landlords of the neighborhood ex-
perience. But this lady visitor, who pre-
tends to be good to the poor, and certainly
does talk as though she were kind-hearted,
what does she come for, if she does not
intend to give them things which are so
plainly needed.'^
The visitor says, sometimes, that in hold-
30
CHARITABLE EFFORT
ing her poor family so hard to a standard
of thrift she is really breaking down a rule
of higher living which they formerly pos-
sessed ; that saving, which seems quite com-
mendable in a comfortable part of town,
appears almost criminal in a poorer quarter
where the next-door neighbor needs food,
even if the children of the family do not.
She feels the sordidness of constantly
being obliged to urge the industrial view of
life. The benevolent individual of fifty
years ago honestly believed that industry
and self-denial in youth would result in
comfortable possessions for old age. It
was, indeed, the method he had practised
in his own youth, and by which he had
probably obtained whatever fortune he pos-
sessed. He therefore reproved the poor
family for indulging their children, urged
them to work long hours, and was utterly
untouched by many scruples which afflict
the contemporary charity visitor. She says
sometimes, " Why must I talk always of
getting work and saving money, the things
31
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
I know nothing about ? If it were anything
else I had to urge, I could do it; anything
like Latin prose, which I had worried
through myself, it would not be so hard."
But she finds it difficult to connect the ex-
periences of her youth with the experiences
of the visited family.
Because of this diversity in experience,
the visitor is continually surprised to find
that the safest platitude may be challenged.
She refers quite naturally to the " horrors of
the saloon," and discovers that the head of
her visited family does not connect them
with " horrors " at all. He remembers all
the kindnesses he has received there, the
free lunch and treating which goes on,
even when a man is out of work and not
able to pay up ; the loan of five dollars he
got there when the charity visitor was miles
away and he was threatened with eviction.
He may listen politely to her reference to
"horrors," but considers it only "temper-
ance talk."
The charity visitor may blame the women
32
CHARITABLE EFFORT
for lack of gentleness toward their children,
for being hasty and rude to them, until she
learns that the standard of breeding is not that
of gentleness toward the children so much as
the observance of certain conventions, such
as the punctilious wearing of mourning gar-
ments after the death of a child. The stand-
ard of gentleness each mother has to work
out largely by herself, assisted only by the
occasional shame-faced remark of a neighbor,
" That they do better when you are not too
hard on them " ; but the wearing of mourn-
ing garments is sustained by the definitely
expressed sentiment of every woman in the
street. The mother would have to bear
social blame, a certain social ostracism, if
she failed to comply with that requirement.
It is not comfortable to outrage the conven-
tions of those among whom we live, and, if
our social life be a narrow one, it is still
more difficult. The visitor may choke a
little when she sees the lessened supply of
food and the scanty clothing provided for
the remaining children in order that one
D 33
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
may be conventionally mourned, but she
doesn't talk so strongly against it as she
would have done during her first month of
experience with the family since bereaved.
The subject of clothes indeed perplexes
the visitor constantly, and the result of her
reflections may be summed up somewhat
in this wise: The girl who has a definite
social standing, who has been to a fashion-
able school or to a college, whose family
live in a house seen and known by all her
friends and associates, may afford to be very
simple, or even shabby as to her clothes, if
she likes. But the working girl, whose
family lives in a tenement, or moves from
one small apartment to another, who has
little social standing and has to make her
own place, knows full well how much habit
and style of dress has to do with her posi-
tion. Her income goes into her clothing,
out of all proportion to the amount which
she spends upon other things. But, if social
advancement is her aim, it is the most sen-
sible thing she can do. She is judged
34
CHARITABLE EFFORT
largely by her clothes. Her house furnish-
ing, with its pitiful little decorations, her
scanty supply of books, are never seen by
the people whose social opinions she most
values. Her clothes are her background,
and from them she is largely judged. / It
is due to this fact that girls' clubs succeed
best in the business part of town, where
" working girls " and " young ladies " meet
upon an equal footing, and where the
clothes superficially look very much alike.
Bright and ambitious girls will come to
these down-town clubs to eat lunch and
rest at noon, to study all sorts of subjects
and listen to lectures, when they might
hesitate a long time before joining a club
identified with their own neighborhood,
where they would be judged not solely on
their own merits and the unconscious social
standing afforded by good clothes, but by
other surroundings which are not nearly
up to these. For the same reason, girls'
clubs are infinitely more difficult to organ-
ize in little towns and villages, where every
35
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHIC.S
one knows every one else, just how the
front parlor is furnished, and the amount
of mortgage there is upon the house.
These facts get in the way of a clear and
unbiassed judgment; they impede the demo-
cratic relationship and add to the self-con-
sciousness of all concerned. Every one
who has had to do with down-town girls'
clubs has had the experience of going into
the home of some bright, well-dressed girl,
to discover it uncomfortable and perhaps
wretched, and to find the girl afterward
carefully avoiding her, although the work-
ing girl may not have been at home when
the call was made, and the visitor may
have carried herself with the utmost cour-
tesy throughout. In some very successful
down-town clubs the home address is not
given at all, and only the " business address "
is required. Have we worked out our de-
mocracy further in regard to clothes than
anything else.f*
The charity visitor has been rightly
brought up to consider it vulgar to spend
36
il
CHARITABLE EFFORT
much money upon clothes, to care so much
for " appearances." She reahzes dimly that
the care for personal decoration over that
for one's home or habitat is in some way
primitive and undeveloped; but she is si-
lenced by its obvious need. She also
catches a glimpse of the fact that the dis- '^
proportionate expenditure of the poor in
the matter of clothes is largely due to the
exclusiveness of the rich who hide from
them the interior of their houses, and their
more subtle pleasures, while of necessity
exhibiting their street clothes and their
street manners. Every one who goes shop-
ping at the same time may see the clothes
of the richest women in town, but only
those invited to her receptions see the
Corot on her walls or the bindings in her
library. The poor naturally try to bridge
the difference by reproducing the street
clothes which they have seen. They are
striving to conform to a common standard
which their democratic training presupposes
belongs to all of us. The charity visitor
37
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
may regret that the Italian peasant woman
has laid aside her picturesque kerchief and
substituted a cheap street hat. But it is
easy to recognize the first attempt toward
democratic expression.
The charity visitor finds herself still more
perplexed when she comes to consider such
problems as those of early marriage and
child labor; for she cannot deal with them
according to economic theories, or accord-
ing to the conventions which have regulated
her own life. She finds both of these fairly
upset by her intimate knowledge of the
situation, and her sympathy for those into
whose lives she has gained a curious in-
sight. She discovers how incorrigibly bour-
geois her standards have been, and it takes
but a little time to reach the conclusion
that she cannot insist so strenuously upon
the conventions of her own class, which
fail to fit the bigger, more emotional, and
freer lives of working people. The charity
visitor holds well-grounded views upon the
imprudence of early marriages, quite natu-
38
CHARITABLE EFFORT
rally because she comes from a family
and circle of professional and business
people. A professional man is scarcely
equipped and started in his profession be-
fore he is thirty. A business man, if he is
on the road to success, is much nearer pros-
perity at thirty-five than twenty-five, and it
is therefore wise for these men not to marry
in the twenties ; but this does not apply to
the workingman. In many trades he is laid
upon the shelf at thirty-five, and in nearly
all trades he receives the largest wages in
his life between twenty and thirty. If the
young workingman has all his wages to
himself, he will probably establish habits of
personal comfort, which he cannot keep up
when he has to divide with a family — habits
which he can, perhaps, never overcome.
The sense of prudence, the necessity for
saving, can never come to a primitive, emo-
tional man with the force of a conviction;
but the necessity of providing for his chil-
dren is a powerful incentive. He naturally
regards his children as his savings-bank; he
39
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
expects them to care for him when he gets
old, and in some trades old age comes very
early. A Jewish tailor was quite lately sent
to the Cook County poorhouse, paralyzed
beyond recovery at the age of thirty-five.
Had his little boy of nine been but a few
years older, he might have been spared this
sorrow of public charity. He was, in fact,
better able to well support a family when
he was twenty than when he was thirty-five,
for his wages had steadily grown less as
the years went on. Another tailor whom
I know, who is also a Socialist, always
speaks of saving as a bourgeois virtue, one
quite impossible to the genuine working-
man. He supports a family consisting of
himself, a wife and three children, and his
two parents on eight dollars a week. He in-
sists it would be criminal not to expend every
penny of this amount upon food and shelter,
and he expects his children later to care
for him.
This economic pressure also accounts for
the tendency to put children to work over-
40
CHARITABLE EFFORT
young and thus cripple their chances for
individual development and usefulness, and
with the avaricious parent also leads to ex-
ploitation. " I have fed her for fourteen
years, now she can help me pay my mort-
gage " is not an unusual reply when a hard-
working father is expostulated with because
he would take his bright daughter out of
school and put her into a factory.
It has long been a common error for the
charity visitor, who is strongly urging her
" family " toward self-support, to suggest, or
at least connive, that the children be put to
work early, although she has not the excuse
that the parents have. It is so easy, after
one has been taking the industrial view for
a long time, to forget the larger and more
social claim ; to urge that the boy go to
work and support his parents, who are re-
ceiving charitable aid. She does not realize
what a cruel advantage the person who dis-
tributes charity has, when she gives advice.
The manager in a huge mercantile estab-
lishment employing many children was able
41
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
to show during a child-labor investigation,
that the only children under fourteen years of
age in his employ were proteges who had
been urged upon him by philanthropic ladies,
not only acquaintances of his, but valued
patrons of the establishment. It is not that
the charity visitor is less wise than other
people, but she has fixed her mind so long
upon the industrial lameness of her family
that she is eager to seize any crutch, how-
ever weak, which may enable them to get on.
She has failed to see that the boy who
attempts to prematurely support his wid-
owed mother may lower wages, add an illit-
erate member to the community, and arrest
the development of a capable workingman.
As she has failed to see that the rules which
obtain in regard to the age of marriage in
her own family may not apply to the work-
ingman, so also she fails to understand that
the present conditions of employment sur-
rounding a factory child are totally unlike
those which obtained during the energetic
youth of her father.
42
CHARITABLE EFFORT
The child who is prematurely put to work
is constantly oppressed by this never ending
question of the means of subsistence, and
even little children are sometimes almost
crushed with the cares of life through their
affectionate sympathy. The writer knows
a little Italian lad of six to whom the prob-
lems of food, clothing, and shelter have
become so immediate and pressing that,
although an imaginative child, he is unable
to see life from any other standpoint. The
goblin or bugaboo, feared by the more fortu-
nate child, in his mind, has come to be the
need of coal which caused his father hysteri-
cal and demonstrative grief when it carried
off his mother's inherited linen, the mosaic
of St. Joseph, and, worst of all, his own
rubber boots. He once came to a party at
Hull-House, and was interested in nothing
save a gas stove which he saw in the kitchen.
He became excited over the discovery that
fire could be produced without fuel. " I will
tell my father of this stove. You buy no
coal, you need only a match. Anybody will
4^
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
give you a match." He was taken to visit
at a country-house and at once inquired how
much rent was paid for it. On being told
carelessly by his hostess that they paid no
rent for that house, he came back quite wild
with interest that the problem was solved.
" Me and my father will go to the country.
You get a big house, all warm, without rent."
Nothing else in the country interested him
but the subject of rent, and he talked of that
with an exclusiveness worthy of a single
taxer.
The struggle for existence, which is so
much harsher among people near the edge
of pauperism, sometimes leaves ugly marks
on character, and the charity visitor finds
these indirect results most mystifying. Par-
ents who work hard and anticipate an old
age when they can no longer earn, take
care that their children shall expect to
divide their wages with them from the very
first. Such a parent, when successful, im-
presses the immature nervous system of the
child thus tyrannically establishing habits
44
CHARITABLE EFFORT
of obedience, so that the nerves and will
may not depart from this control when
the child is older. The charity visitor,
whose family relation is lifted quite out of
this, does not in the least understand
the industrial foundation for this family
tyranny.
The head of a kindergarten training-class
once addressed a club of working women,
and spoke of the despotism which is often
established over little children. She said
that the so-called determination to break a
child's will many times arose from a lust of
dominion, and she urged the ideal relation-
ship founded upon love and confidence.
But many of the women were puzzled. One
of them remarked to the writer as she came
out of the club room, " If you did not keep
control over them from the time they were
little, you would never get their wages when
they are grown up." Another one said,
"Ah, of course she (meaning the speaker)
doesn't have to depend upon her children's
wages. She can afford to be lax with them,
45
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
because even if they don't give money to her,
she can get along without it."
There are an impressive number of chil-
dren who uncomplainingly and constantly
hand over their weekly wages to their
parents, sometimes receiving back ten cents
or a quarter for spending-money, but quite
as often nothing at all ; and the writer
knows one girl of twenty-five who for six
years has received two cents a week from
the constantly falling wages which she earns
in a large factory. Is it habit or virtue
which holds her steady in this course? If
love and tenderness had been substituted
for parental despotism, would the mother
have had enough affection, enough power
of expression to hold her daughter's sense
of money obligation through all these years ?
This girl who spends her paltry two cents
on chewing-gum and goes plainly clad in
clothes of her mother's choosing, while many
of her friends spend their entire wages on
those clothes which factory girls love so
well, must be held by some powerful force.
46
CHARITABLE EFFORT
The charity visitor finds these subtle and
elusive problems most harrowing. The
head of a family she is visiting is a man
who has become black-listed in a strike. He
is not a very good workman, and this, added
to his agitator's reputation, keeps him out
of work for a long time. The fatal result
of being long out of work follows: he be-
comes less and less eager for it, and gets
a "job" less and less frequently. In order
to keep up his self-respect, and still more to
keep his wife's respect for him, he yields
to the little self-deception that this prolonged
idleness follows because he was once black-
listed, and he gradually becomes a martyr.
Deep down in his heart perhaps — but
who knows what may be deep down in his
heart? Whatever may be in his wife's,
she does not show for an instant that she
thinks he has grown lazy, and accustomed
to see her earn, by sewing and cleaning,
most of the scanty income for the family.
The charity visitor, however, does see this,
and she also sees that the other men who
47
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
were in the strike have gone back to work.
She further knows by inquiry and a Httle
experience that the man is not skilful. She
cannot, however, call him lazy and good-
for-nothing, and denounce him as worthless
as her grandmother might have done, be-
cause of certain intellectual conceptions at
which she has arrived. She sees other
workmen come to him for shrewd advice;
she knows that he spends many more hours
in the public library reading good books
than the average workman has time to do.
He has formed no bad habits and has yielded
only to those subtle temptations toward a
life of leisure which come to the intellectual
man. He lacks the qualifications which
would induce his union to engage him as
a secretary or organizer, but he is a constant
speaker at workingmen's meetings, and takes
a high moral attitude on the questions
discussed there. He contributes a certain
intellectuality to his friends, and he has
undoubted social value. The neighboring
women confide to the charity visitor their
48
CHARITABLE EFFORT
sympathy with his wife, because she has to
work so hard, and because her husband does
not "provide." Their remarks are sharp-
ened by a certain -resentment toward the
superiority of the husband's education and
gentle manners. The charity visitor is
ashamed to take this point of view, for she
knows that it is not altogether fair. She is
reminded of a college friend of hers, who
told her that she was not going to allow
her literary husband to write unworthy pot-
boilers for the sake of earning a living. " I
insist that we shall live within my own
income ; that he shall not publish until he
is ready, and can give his genuine message."
The charity visitor recalls what she has
heard of another acquaintance, who urged
her husband to decline a lucrative position
as a railroad attorney, because she wished
him to be free to take municipal positions,
and handle public questions without the
inevitable suspicion which unaccountably
attaches itself in a corrupt city to a corpo-
ration attorney. The action of these two
E 49
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
women seemed noble to her, but in their
cases they merely lived on a lesser income.
In the case of the workingman's wife, she
faced living on no income at all, or on the
precarious one which she might be able to
get together.
She sees that this third woman has made
the greatest sacrifice, and she is utterly un-
willing to condemn her while praising the
friends of her own social position. She
realizes, of course, that the situation is
changed by the fact that the third family
needs charity, while the other two do not;
but, after all, they have not asked for it,
and their plight was only discovered through
an accident to one of the children. The
charity visitor has been taught that her
mission is to preserve the finest traits to
be found in her visited family, and she
shrinks from the thought of convincing the
wife that her husband is worthless and
she suspects that she might turn all this
beautiful devotion into complaining drudg-
ery. To be sure, she could give up visit-
5°
CHARITABLE EFFORT
ing the family altogether, but she has
become much interested in the progress
of the crippled child who eagerly antici-
pates her visits, and she also suspects that
she will never know many finer women
than the mother. She is unwilling, there-
fore, to give up the friendship, and goes
on bearing her perplexities as best she
may.
The first impulse of our charity visitor
is to be somewhat severe with her shift-
less family for spending money on pleas-
ures and indulging their children out of
all proportion to their means. The poor
family which receives beans and coal from
the county, and pays for a bicycle on the
instalment plan, is not unknown to any
of us. But as the growth of juvenile crime
becomes gradually understood, and as the
danger of giving no legitimate and organ-
ized pleasure to the child becomes clearer,
we remember that primitive man had
games long before he cared for a house or
regular meals.
51
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
There are certain boys in many city
neighborhoods who form themselves into
little gangs with a leader who is somewhat
more intrepid than the rest. Their favorite
performance is to break into an untenanted
house, to knock off the faucets, and cut
the lead pipe, which they sell to the near-
est junk dealer. With the money thus
procured they buy beer and drink it in
litde free-booter's groups sitting in the alley.
From beginning to end they have the
excitement of knowing that they may be
seen and caught by the "coppers," and are
at times quite breathless with suspense.
It is not the least unlike, in motive and
execution, the practice of country boys who
go forth in squads to set traps for rabbits
or to round up a coon.
It is characterized by a pure spirit for
adventure, and the vicious training really
begins when they are arrested, or when
an older boy undertakes to guide them
into further excitements. From thg, ji(^.ery.
beginning the most enticing and exciting
52
CHARITABLE EFFORT
experiences which they have seen have
been connected wijli^ crime. The police-
man embodies all the majesty of successful
law and established government in his
brass buttons and dazzlingly equipped patrol
wagon.
The boy who has been arrested comes
back more or less a hero with a tale to
tell of the interior recesses of the mysteri-
ous police station. The earliest public
excitement the child remembers is divided
between the rattling fire engines, "the
time there was a fire in the next block,"
and all the tense interest of the patrol
wagon "the time the drunkest lady in our
street was arrested."
In the first year of their settlement the
Hull- House residents took fifty kinder-
garten children to Lincoln Park, only to be
grieved by their apathetic interest in trees
and flowers. As they came back with an om-
nibus full of tired and sleepy children, they
were surprised to find them galvanized into
sudden life because a patrol wagon rattled
53
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
by. Their eager little heads popped out
of the windows full of questioning: "Was
it a man or a woman ? " " How many
policemen inside ? " and eager little tongues
began to tell experiences of arrests which
baby eyes had witnessed.
The excitement of a chase, the chances
of competition, and the love of a fight are
all centred in the outward display of crime.
The parent who receives charitable aid and
yet provides pleasure for his child, and is
willing to indulge him in his play, is blindly
doing one of the wisest things possible ; and
no one is more eager for playgrounds and
vacation schools than the conscientious
charity visitor.
This very imaginative impulse and at-
tempt to live in a pictured world of their
own, which seems the simplest prerogative
of childhood, often leads the boys into
difficulty. Three boys aged seven, nine,
and ten were once brought into a neigh-
boring police station under the charge of
pilfering and destroying property. They
54
CHARITABLE EFFORT
had dug a cave under a railroad viaduct
in which they had spent many days and
nights of the summer vacation. They had
" swiped " potatoes and other vegetables
from hucksters' carts, which they had
cooked and eaten in true brigand fashion;
they had decorated the interior of the
excavation with stolen junk, representing
swords and firearms, to their romantic im-
aginations. The father of the ringleader
was a janitor living in a building five miles
away in a prosperous portion of the city.
The landlord did not want an active boy
in the building, and his mother was dead ;
the janitor paid for the boy's board and
lodging to a needy woman living near the
viaduct. She conscientiously gave him his
breakfast and supper, and left something in
the house for his dinner every morning
when she went to work in a neighboring
factory ; but was too tired by night to chal-
lenge his statement that he " would rather
sleep outdoors in the summer," or to in-
vestigate what he did during the day. In
55
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
the meantime the three boys lived in a
world of their own, made up from the
reading of adventurous stories and their
vivid imaginations, steadily pilfering more
and more as the days went by, and actually
imperilling the safety of the traffic passing
over the street on the top of the viaduct.
In spite of vigorous exertions on their be-
half, one of the boys was sent to the
Reform School, comforting himself with
the conclusive remark, " Well, we had fun
anyway, and maybe they will let us dig a
cave at the School ; it is in the country,
where we can't hurt anything."
In addition to books of adventure, or
even reading of any sort, the scenes and
ideals of the theatre largely form the man-
ners and morals of the young people.
" Going to the theatre " is indeed the
most common and satisfactory form of rec-
reation. Many boys who conscientiously
give all their wages to their mothers have
returned each week ten cents to pay for a
seat in the gallery of a theatre on Sunday
56
CHARITABLE EFFORT
afternoon. It Is their one satisfactory
glimpse of life — the moment when they
" issue forth from themselves " and are
stirred and thoroughly interested. They
quite simply adopt as their own, and imi-
tate as best they can, all that they see
there. In moments of genuine grief and
excitement the words and the gestures they
employ are those copied from the stage,
and the tawdry expression often conflicts
hideously with the fine and genuine emotion
of which it is the inadequate and vulgar
vehicle.
As In the matter of dress, more refined
and simpler manners and mode of expres-
sions are unseen by them, and they must
perforce copy what they know.
If we agree with a recent definition of
Art, as that which causes the spectator to lose
his sense of isolation, there is no doubt that
the popular theatre, with all its faults, more
nearly fulfils the function of art for the mul-
titude of working people than all the "free
galleries " and picture exhibits combined.
57
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
The greatest difficulty Is experienced when
the two standards come sharply together,
and when both sides make an attempt at
understanding and explanation. The diffi-
culty of making clear one's own ethical
standpoint is at times insurmountable. A
woman who had bought and sold school
books stolen from the school fund, — books
which are all plainly marked with a red
stamp, — came to Hull House one morning
in great distress because she had been
arrested, and begged a resident "to speak
to the judge." She gave as a reason the
fact that the House had known her for six
years, and had once been very good to her
when her little girl was buried. The resi-
dent more than suspected that her visitor
knew the school books were stolen when
buying them, and any attempt to talk upon
that subject was evidently considered very
rude. The visitor wished to get out of her
trial, and evidently saw no reason why the
House should not help her. The alder-
man was out of town, so she could not go
58
CHARITABLE EFFORT
to him. After a long conversation the
visitor entirely failed to get another point
of view and went away grieved and dis-
appointed at a refusal, thinking the resi-
dent simply disobliging; wondering, no
doubt, why such a mean woman had once
been good to her; leaving the resident, on
the other hand, utterly baffled and in the
state of mind she would have been in, had
she brutally insisted that a little child
should lift weights too heavy for its un-
developed muscles.
Such a situation brings out the impos-
sibility of substituting a higher ethical
standard for a lower one without similarity
of experience, but it is not as painful as that
illustrated by the following example, in which
the highest ethical standard yet attained
by the charity recipient is broken down,
and the substituted one not in the least
understood : —
A certain charity visitor is peculiarly
appealed to by the weakness and pathos of
forlorn old age. She is responsible for the
59
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
well-being of perhaps a dozen old women to
whom she sustains a sincerely affectionate
and almost filial relation. Some of them
learn to take her benefactions quite as if
they came from their own relatives, grum-
bling at all she does, and scolding her with
a family freedom. One of these poor old
women was injured in a fire years ago.
She has but the fragment of a hand left, and
is grievously crippled in her feet. Through
years of pain she had become addicted to
opium, and when she first came under the
visitor's care, was only held from the poor-
house by the awful thought that she would
there perish without her drug. Five years
of tender care have done wonders for her.
She lives in two neat little rooms, where
with her thumb and two fingers she makes
innumerable quilts, which she sells and gives
away with the greatest delight. Her opium
is regulated to a set amount taken each day,
and she has been drawn away from much
drinking. She is a voracious reader, and has
her head full of strange tales made up from
60
CHARITABLE EFFORT
books and her own imagination. At one
time it seemed impossible to do anything
for her in Chicago, and she was kept for two
years in a suburb, where the family of the
charity visitor lived, and where she was
nursed through several hazardous illnesses.
She now lives a better life than she did,
but she is still far from being a model
old woman. The neighbors are constantly
shocked by the fact that she is supported
and comforted by a " charity lady," while at
the same time she occasionally " rushes the
growler," scolding at the boys lest they jar
her in her tottering walk. The care of her
has broken through even that second stand-
ard, which the neighborhood had learned
to recognize as the standard of charitable
societies, that only the " worthy poor " are to
be helped ; that temperance and thrift are
the virtues which receive the plums of be-
nevolence. The old lady herself is conscious
of this criticism. Indeed, irate neighbors
tell her to her face that she doesn't in the
least deserve what she gets. In order to
6i
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
disarm them, and at the same time to ex-
plain what would otherwise seem loving-
kindness so colossal as to be abnormal, she
tells them that during her sojourn in the
suburb she discovered an awful family
secret, — a horrible scandal connected with
the long-suffering charity visitor; that it is
in order to prevent the divulgence of this
that she constantly receives her ministra-
tions. Some of her perplexed neighbors
accept this explanation as simple and offer-
ing a solution of this vexed problem. Doubt-
less many of them have a glimpse of the
real state of affairs, of the love and patience
which ministers to need irrespective of
worth. But the standard is too high for
most of them, and it sometimes seems un-
fortunate to break down the second stand-
ard, which holds that people who " rush the
growler " are not worthy of charity, and that
there is a certain justice attained when they
go to the poorhouse. It is certainly dan-
gerous to break down the lower, unless the
higher is made clear.
62
CHARITABLE EFFORT
Just when our affection becomes large
enough to care for the unworthy among the
poor as we would care for the unworthy
among our own kin, is certainly a perplex-
ing question. To say that it should never
be so, is a comment upon our democratic
relations to them which few of us would be
willing to make.
Of what use is all this striving and per-
plexity ? Has the experience any value ?
It is certainly genuine, for it induces an
occasional charity visitor to live in a tene-
ment house as simply as the other tenants
do. It drives others to give up visiting the
poor altogether, because, they claim, it is
quite impossible unless the individual be-
comes a member of a sisterhood, which
requires, as some of the Roman Catholic
sisterhoods do, that the member first take
the vows of obedience and poverty, so that
she can have nothing to give save as it is
first given to her, and thus she is not
harassed by a constant attempt at adjust-
ment.
63
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
Both the tenement-house resident and the
sister assume to have put themselves upon
the industrial level of their neighbors, al-
though they have left out the most awful
element of poverty, that of imminent fear of
starvation and a neglected old age.
The young charity visitor who goes from
a family living upon a most precarious indus-
trial level to her own home in a prosperous
part of the city, if she is sensitive at all, is
never free from perplexities which our grow-
ing democracy forces upon her.
We sometimes say that our charity is too
scientific, but we would doubtless be much
more correct in our estimate if we said that
it is not scientific enough. We dislike the
entire arrangement of cards alphabetically
classified according to streets and names of
families, with the unrelated and meaningless
details attached to them. Our feeling of
revolt is probably not unlike that which
afflicted the students of botany and geology
in the middle of the last century, when
flowers were tabulated in alphabetical order,
64
CHARITABLE EFFORT
when geology was taught by colored charts
and thin books. No doubt the students,
wearied to death, many times said that it
was all too scientific, and were much per-
plexed and worried when they found traces
of structure and physiology which their so-
called scientific principles were totally unable
to account for. But all this happened before
science had become evolutionary and sci-
entific at all, before it had a principle of
life from within. The very indications and
P" discoveries which formerly perplexed, later
illumined and made the study absorbing
and vital.
We are singularly slow to apply this
evolutionary principle to human affairs in
general, although it is fast being applied
ii to the education of children. We are at
last learning to follow the development
of the child ; to expect certain traits under
certain conditions ; to adapt methods and
matter to his growing mind. No "ad-
vanced educator" can allow himself to be
so absorbed in the question of what a child
F 65
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
,1 ought to be as to exclude the discovery of
what he is. But in our charitable efforts
we think much more of what a man ought
to be than of what he is or of what he may
become ; and we ruthlessly force our con-
ventions and standards upon him, with a
sternness which we would consider stupid
indeed did an educator use it in forcing his
mature intellectual convictions upon an un-
developed mind.
Let us take the example of a timid child,
who cries when he is put to bed because
he is afraid of the dark. The "soft-hearted "
parent stays with him, simply because he is
sorry for him and wants to comfort him.
The scientifically trained parent stays with
him, because he realizes that the child is in
a stage of development in which his imagi-
nation has the best of him, and in which
it is impossible to reason him out of a belief
in ghosts. These two parents, wide apart
in point of view, after all act much alike,
and both very differently from the pseudo-
scientific parent, who acts from dogmatic
66
CHARITABLE EFFORT
conviction and is sure he is right. He
talks of developing his child's self-respect
and good sense, and leaves him to cry him-
self to sleep, demanding powers of self-
control and development which the child
does not possess. There is no doubt that y
our development of charity methods has
reached this pseudo-scientific and stilted
stage. We have learned to condemn un-
thinking, ill-regulated kind-heartedness, and
we take great pride in mere repression much
as the stern parent tells the visitor below
how admirably he is rearing the child, who
is hysterically crying upstairs and laying
the foundation for future nervous disorders.
The pseudo-scientific spirit, or rather, the
undeveloped stage of our philanthropy, is
perhaps most clearly revealed in our ten-
dency to lay constant stress on negative
action. " Don't give ; " " don't break down
self-respect," we are constantly told. We
distrust the human impulse as well as the
teachings of our own experience, and in
their stead substitute dogmatic rules for
67
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
conduct. We forget that the accumulation
of knowledge and the holding of convictions
must finally result in the application of that
knowledge and those convictions to life
itself; that the necessity for activity and a
pull upon the sympathies is so severe, that
all the knowledge in the possession of the
visitor is constantly applied, and she has a
reasonable chance for an ultimate intel-
lectual comprehension. Indeed, part of the
perplexity in the administration of charity
comes from the fact that the type of person
drawn to it is the one who insists that her
convictions shall not be unrelated to action.
Her moral concepts constantly tend to float
away from her, unless they have a basis in
the concrete relation of life. She is con-
fronted with the task of reducing her scru-
ples to action, and of converging many wills,
so as to unite the strength of all of them into
one accomplishment, the value of which no
one can foresee.
On the other hand, the young woman who
has succeeded in expressing her social com-
68
CHARITABLE EFFORT
punction through charitable effort finds that
the wider social activity, and the contact
with the larger experience, not only increases
her sense of social obligation but at the
same time recasts her social ideals. She is
chagrined to discover that in the actual task
of reducing her social scruples to action, her
humble beneficiaries are far in advance of
her, not in charity or singleness of purpose,
but in self-sacrificing action. She reaches
the old-time virtue of humility by a social
process, not in the old way, as the man who
sits by the side of the road and puts dust
upon his head, calling himself a contrite
sinner, but she gets the dust upon her head
because she has stumbled and fallen in the
road through her efforts to push forward the
mass, to march with her fellows. She has|
I
socialized her virtues not only through a|
social aim but by a social process.
The Hebrew prophet made three require-
ments from those who would join the great
forward-moving procession led by Jehovah.
" To love mercy " and at the same time " to
69
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
do justly " is the difficult task ; to fulfil the
first requirement alone is to fall into the
error of indiscriminate giving with all its
disastrous results ; to fulfil the second solely
is to obtain the stern policy of withholding,
and it results in such a dreary lack of sym-
pathy and understanding that the establish-
ment of justice is impossible. It may be
that the combination of the two can never
be attained save as we fulfil still the third
requirement — "to walk humbly with God,"
which may mean to walk for many dreary
miles beside the lowliest of His creatures,
not even in that peace of mind which the
company of the humble is popularly sup-
posed to afford, but rather with the pangs
and throes to which the poor human under-
standing is subjected whenever it attempts
to comprehend the meaning of life.
70
CHAPTER III
Filial Relations
There are many people in every com-
munity who have not felt the "social com-
punction," who do not share the effort
toward a higher social morality, who are
even unable to sympathetically interpret it.
Some of these have been shielded from the
inevitable and salutary failures which the
trial of new powers involve, because they
are content to attain standards of virtue
demanded by an easy public opinion, and
others of them have exhausted their moral
energy in attaining to the current standard
of individual and family righteousness.
Such people, who form the bulk of con-
tented society, demand that the radical, the
reformer, shall be without stain or question
in his personal and family relations, and
71
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
judge most harshly any deviation from the
estabHshed standards. There is a certain
justice in this : it expresses the inherent
conservatism of the mass of men, that none
of the established virtues which have been
so slowly and hardly acquired shall be sac-
rificed for the sake of making problematic
advance ; that the individual, in his attempt
to develop and use the new and exalted
virtue, shall not fall into the easy tempta-
tion of letting the ordinary ones slip through
his fingers.
This instinct to conserve the old stand-
ards, combined with a distrust of the new
standard, is a constant difificulty in the way
of those experiments and advances depending
upon the initiative of women, both because
women are the more sensitive to the indi-
vidual and family claims, and because their
training has tended to make them content
with the response to these claims alone.
There is no doubt that, in the effort to
sustain the moral energy necessary to work
out a more satisfactory social relation, the
72
FILIAL RELATIONS
individual often sacrifices the energy which
should legitimately go into the fulfilment
of personal and family claims, to what he
considers the higher claim.
In considering the changes which our
increasing democracy is constantly making
upon various relationships, it is impossible
to ignore the filial relation. This chapter
deals with the relation between parents and
their grown-up daughters, as affording an
explicit illustration of the perplexity and
mal-adjustment brought about by the vari-
ous attempts of young women to secure a
more active share in the community life.
We constantly see parents very much dis-
concerted and perplexed in regard to their
daughters when these daughters undertake
work lying quite outside of traditional and
family interests. These parents insist that
the girl is carried away by a foolish enthu-
siasm, that she is in search of a career, that
she is restless and does not know what she
wants. They will give any reason, almost,
rather than the recognition of a genuine
73
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and dignified claim. Possibly all this is
due to the fact that for so many hundreds of
years women have had no larger interests, no
participation in the affairs lying quite outside
personal and family claims. Any attempt
that the individual woman formerly made to
subordinate or renounce the family claim
was inevitably construed to mean that she
was setting up her own will against that
of her family's for selfish ends. It was con-
cluded that she could have no motive larger
than a desire to serve her family, and her
attempt to break away must therefore be
wilful and self-indulgent.
The family logically consented to give her
up at her marriage, when she was enlarging
the family tie by founding another family.
It was easy to understand that they per-
mitted and even promoted her going to
college, travelling in Europe, or any other
means of self-improvement, because these
merely meant the development and cultiva-
tion of one of its own members. When,
however, she responded to her impulse to
74
FILIAL RELATIONS
fulfil the social or democratic claim, she
violated every tradition.
The mind of each one of us reaches back
to our first struggles as we emerged from
self-willed childhood into a recognition of
family obligations. We have all gradu-
ally learned to respond to them, and yet
most of us have had at least fleeting glimpses
of what it might be to disregard them and
the elemental claim they make upon us.
We have yielded at times to the temptation
of ignoring them for selfish aims, of con-
sidering the individual and not the family
convenience, and we remember with shame
the self-pity which inevitably followed. But
just as we have learned to adjust the per-
sonal and family claims, and to find an
orderly development impossible without rec-
ognition of both, so perhaps we are called
upon now to make a second adjustment
between the family and the social claim,
in which neither shall lose and both be
ennobled.
The attempt to bring about a healing
75
I
n;
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
compromise in which the two shall be ad-
justed in proper relation is not an easy one.
It is difficult to distinguish between the
outward act of him who in following one
legitimate claim has been led into the tem-
porary violation of another, and the outward
act of him who deliberately renounces a just
claim and throws aside all obligation for the
sake of his own selfish and individual devel-
opment. The man, for instance, who deserts
his family that he may cultivate an artistic
sensibility, or acquire what he considers
more fulness of life for himself, must always
arouse our contempt. Breaking the mar-
riage tie as Ibsen's " Nora " did, to obtain
a larger self-development, or holding to it
as George Eliot's " Romola " did, because
of the larger claim of the state and society,
must always remain two distinct paths. The
collision of interests, each of which has a
real moral basis and a right to its own place
in life, is bound to be more or less tragic.
It is the struggle between two claims, the
destruction of either of which would bring
76
FILIAL RELATIONS
ruin to the ethical life. Curiously enough,
it is almost exactly this contradiction which
is the tragedy set forth by the Greek drama-
tist, who asserted that the gods who watch
over the sanctity of the family bond must
yield to the higher claims of the gods of the
state. The failure to recognize the social
claim as legitimate causes the trouble ; the
suspicion constantly remains that woman's
public efforts are merely selfish and captious,
and are not directed to the general good.
This suspicion will never be dissipated until
parents, as well as daughters, feel the demo-
cratic impulse and recognize the social
claim.
Our democracy is making inroads upon
the family, the oldest of human institutions,
and a claim is being advanced which in a
certain sense is larger than the family claim.
The claim of the state in time of war has
long been recognized, so that in its name the
family has given up sons and husbands and
even the fathers of little children. If we can
once see the claims of society in any such
77
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
light, if its misery and need can be made
clear and urged as an explicit claim, as the
state urges its claims in the time of danger,
then for the first time the daughter who
desires to minister to that need will be
recognized as acting conscientiously. This
recognition may easily come first through
the emotions, and may be admitted as a
response to pity and mercy long before it
is formulated and perceived by the intellect.
The family as well as the state we are
all called upon to maintain as the highest
institutions which the race has evolved for
its safeguard and protection. But merely
to preserve these institutions is not enough.
There come periods of reconstruction, dur-
ing which the task is laid upon a passing
generation, to enlarge the function and
carry forward the ideal of a long-established
institution. There is no doubt that many
women, consciously and unconsciously, are
struggling with this task. The family, like
every other element of human life, is sus-
ceptible of progress, and from epoch to
78
FILIAL RELATIONS
epoch its tendencies and aspirations are
enlarged, although its duties can never be
abrogated and its obligations can never be
cancelled. It is impossible to bring about
the higher development by any self-asser-
tion or breaking away of the individual
will. The new growth in the plant swell-
ing against the sheath, which at the same
time imprisons and protects it, must still
be the truest type of progress. The family
in its entirety must be carried out into the
larger life. Its various members together
must recognize and acknowledge the valid-
ity of the social obligation. When this
does not occur we have a most flagrant
example of the ill-adjustment and misery
arising when an ethical code is applied too
rigorously and too conscientiously to con-
ditions which are no longer the same as
when the code was instituted, and for which
it was never designed. We have all seen
parental control and the family claim assert
their authority in fields of effort which be-
long to the adult judgment of the child and
79
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
pertain to activity quite outside the family
life. Probably the distinctively family
tragedy of which we all catch glimpses
now and then, is the assertion of this au-
thority through all the entanglements of
wounded affection and misunderstanding.
We see parents and children acting from
conscientious motives and with the tender-
est affection, yet bringing about a misery
which can scarcely be hidden.
Such glimpses remind us of that tragedy
enacted centuries ago in Assisi, when the
eager young noble cast his very clothing
at his father's feet, dramatically renouncing
his filial allegiance, and formally subjecting
the narrow family claim to the wider and
more universal duty. All the conflict of
tragedy ensued which might have been
averted, had the father recognized the
higher claim, and had he been willing to
subordinate and adjust his own claim to
it. The father considered his son disre-
spectful and hard-hearted, yet we know St.
Francis to have been the most tender and
80
FILIAL RELATIONS
loving of men, responsive to all possible
ties, even to those of inanimate nature.
We know that by his affections he freed
the frozen life of his time. The elements
of tragedy lay in the narrowness of the
father's mind ; in his lack of comprehen-
sion and his lack of sympathy with the
power which was moving his son, and
which was but part of the religious revival
which swept Europe from end to end in
the early part of the thirteenth century;
the same power which built the cathe-
drals of the North, and produced the saints
and sages of the South. But the father's
situation was nevertheless genuine; he felt
his heart sore and angry, and his dignity
covered with disrespect. He could not,
indeed, have felt otherwise, unless he had
been touched by the fire of the same re-
vival, and lifted out of and away from the
contemplation of himself and his narrower
claim. It is another proof that the no-
tion of a larger obligation can only come
through the response to an enlarged inter-
G Si
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
est in life and in the social movements
around us.
The grown-up son has so long been con-
sidered a citizen with well-defined duties
and a need of "making his way in the
world," that the family claim is urged much
less strenuously in his case, and as a
matter of authority, it ceases gradually
to be made at all. In the case of the
grown-up daughter, however, who is under
no necessity of earning a living, and who
has no strong artistic bent, taking her to
Paris to study painting or to Germany to
study music, the years immediately follow-
ing her graduation from college are too
often filled with a restlessness and unhap-
piness which might be avoided by a little
clear thinking, and by an adaptation of our
code of family ethics to modern conditions.
It is always difficult for the family to
regard the daughter otherwise than as a
family possession. From her babyhood she
has been the charm and grace of the
household, and it is hard to think of her
82
FILIAL RELATIONS
as an integral part of the social order,
hard to believe that she has duties out-
side of the family, to the state and to
society in the larger sense. This assump-
tion that the daughter is solely an inspira-
tion and refinement to the family itself and
its own immediate circle, that her delicacy
and polish are but outward symbols of her
father's protection and prosperity, worked
very smoothly for the most part so long
as her education was in line with it. When
there was absolutely no recognition of the
entity of woman's life beyond the family^
w^hen the outside claims upon her were
still wholly unrecognized, the situation was
simple, and the finishing school harmoni-
ously and elegantly answered all require-
ments. She was fitted to grace the fireside
and to add lustre to that social circle which
her parents selected for her. But this family
assumption has been notably broken into,
and educational ideas no longer fit it. Mod-
ern education recognizes woman quite apart
from family or society claims, and gives
«3
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
her the training which for many years has
been deemed successful for highly develop-
ing a man's individuality and freeing his
powers for independent action. Perplexi-
ties often occur when the daughter returns
from college and finds that this recogni-
tion has been but partially accomplished.
When she attempts to act upon the as-
sumption of its accomplishment, she finds
herself jarring upon ideals which are so
entwined with filial piety, so rooted in the
tenderest affections of which the human
heart is capable, that both daughter and
parents are shocked and startled when they
discover what is happening, and they
scarcely venture to analyze the situation.
The ideal for the education of woman has
changed under the pressure of a new claim..
The family has responded to the extent of
granting the education, but they are jeal-
ous of the new claim and assert the family
claim as over against it.
The modern woman finds herself edu-
cated to recognize a stress of social obliga-
84
FILIAL RELATIONS
tion which her family did not in the least
anticipate when they sent her to college.
She finds herself, in addition, under an
impulse to act her part as a citizen of the
world. She accepts her family inheritance
with loyalty and affection, but she has en-
tered into a wider inheritance as well,
which, for lack of a better phrase, we call
the social claim. This claim has been rec-
ognized for four years in her training, but
after her return from college the family
claim is again exclusively and strenuously
asserted. The situation has all the dis-
comfort of transition and compromise.
The daughter finds a constant and totally
unnecessary conflict between the social and
the family claims. In most cases the
former is repressed and gives way to the
family claim, because the latter is concrete
and definitely asserted, while the social
demand is vague and unformulated. In
such instances the girl quietly submits, but
she feels wronged whenever she allows her
mind to dwell upon the situation. She
85
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
either hides her hurt, and splendid reserves
of enthusiasm and capacity go to waste, or
her zeal and emotions are turned inward,
and the result is an unhappy woman, whose
heart is consumed by vain regrets and
desires.
If the college woman is not thus quietly
reabsorbed, she is even reproached for her
discontent. She is told to be devoted to
her family, inspiring and responsive to her
social circle, and to give the rest of her
time to further self-improvement and enjoy-
ment. She expects to do this, and responds
to these claims to the best of her ability,
even heroically sometimes. But where is
the larger life of which she has dreamed
so long.? That life which surrounds and
completes the individual and family life.?
She has been taught that it is her duty to
share this life, and her highest privilege
to extend it. This divergence between her
self-centred existence and her best convic-
tions becomes constantly more apparent.
But the situation is not even so simple
86
FILIAL RELATIONS
as a conflict between her affections and
her intellectual convictions, although even
that is tumultuous enough, also the emo-
tional nature is divided against itself. The
social claim is a demand upon the emo-
tions as well as upon the intellect, and in
ignoring it she represses not only her con-
victions but lowers her springs of vitality.
Her life is full of contradictions. She
looks out into the world, longing that some
demand be made upon her powers, for
they are too untrained to furnish an initia-
tive. When her health gives way under — h( o..,
this strain, as it often does, her physician
invariably advises a rest. But to be put
to bed and fed on milk is not what she
requires. What she needs is simple,
health-giving activity, which, involving the
use of all her faculties, shall be a response
to all the claims which she so keenly
feels.
It is quite true that the family often
resents her first attempts to be part of a
life quite outside their own, because the
^7
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
college woman frequently makes these first
attempts most awkwardly ; her faculties
have not been trained in the line of action.
She lacks the ability to apply her knowl-
edge and theories to life itself and to its
complicated situations. This is largely the
fault of her training and of the one-sidedness
of educational methods. The colleges have
long been full of the best ethical teaching,
insisting that the good of the whole must
ultimately be the measure of effort, and
that the individual can only secure his own
rights as he labors to secure those of others.
But while the teaching has included an
ever-broadening range of obligation and has
insisted upon the recognition of the claims
of human brotherhood, the training has
been singularly individualistic ; it has fos-
tered ambitions for personal distinction, and
has trained the faculties almost exclusively
in the direction of intellectual accumula-
tion. Doubtless, woman's education is at
fault, in that it has failed to recognize cer-
tain needs, and has failed to cultivate and
88
FILIAL RELATIONS
guide the larger desires of which all gener-
ous young hearts are full.
During the most formative years of life,
it gives the young girl no contact with the
feebleness of childhood, the pathos of suf-
fering, or the needs of old age. It gathers
together crude youth in contact only with
each other and with mature men and women
who are there for the purpose of their men-
tal direction. The tenderest promptings
are bidden to bide their time. This could
only be justifiable if a definite outlet were
provided when they leave college. Doubt-
less the need does not differ widely in men
and women, but women not absorbed in pro-
fessional or business life, in the years imme-
diately following college, are baldly brought
face to face with the deficiencies of their
training. Apparently every obstacle is re-
moved, and the college woman is at last
free to begin the active life, for which, dur-
ing so many years, she has been preparing.
But during this so-called preparation, her
faculties have been trained solely for ac-
89
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
cumulation, and she has learned to utterly
distrust the finer impulses of her nature,
which would naturally have connected her
with human interests outside of her family
and her own immediate social circle. All
through school and college the young soul
dreamed of self-sacrifice, of succor to the
helpless and of tenderness to the unfortu-
nate. We persistently distrust these desires,
and, unless they follow well-defined lines,
we repress them with every device of con-
vention and caution.
One summer the writer went from a two
weeks' residence in East London, where
she had become sick and bewildered by
the sights and sounds encountered there,
directly to Switzerland. She found the
beaten routes of travel filled with young
English men and women who could walk
many miles a day, and who could climb
peaks so inaccessible that the feats received
honorable mention in Alpine journals, — a
result which filled their families with joy
and pride. These young people knew to
90
FILIAL RELATIONS
a nicety the proper diet and clothing which
would best contribute toward endurance.
Everything was very fine about them save
their motive power. The writer does not
refer to the hard-worked men and women
who were taking a vacation, but to the
leisured young people, to whom this period
was the most serious of the year, and filled
with the most strenuous exertion. They
did not, of course, thoroughly enjoy it,
for we are too complicated to be content
with mere exercise. Civilization has bound
us too closely with our brethren for any
one of us to be long happy in the cultiva-
tion of mere individual force or in the
accumulation of mere muscular energy.
With Whitechapel constantly in mind, it
was difficult not to advise these young
people to use some of this muscular energy
of which they were so proud, in cleaning
neglected alleys and paving soggy streets.
Their stores of enthusiasm might stir to
energy the listless men and women of
East London and utilize latent social
91
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
forces. The exercise would be quite as
good, the need of endurance as great, the
care for proper dress and food as impor-
tant; but the motives for action would be
turned from selfish ones into social ones.
Such an appeal would doubtless be met
with a certain response from the young
people, but would never be countenanced
by their families for an instant.
Fortunately a beginning has been made
in another direction, and a few parents have
already begun to consider even their little
children in relation to society as well as to
the family. The young mothers who attend
" Child Study " classes have a larger notion
of parenthood and expect given character-
istics from their children, at certain ages
and under certain conditions. They quite
calmly watch the various attempts of a child
to assert his individuality, which so often
takes the form of opposition to the wishes
of the family and to the rule of the house-
hold. They recognize as acting under the
same law of development the little child of
92
I FILIAL RELATIONS
three who persistently runs away and pre-
tends not to hear his mother's voice, the boy
of ten who violently, although temporarily,
resents control of any sort, and the grown-up
son who, by an individualized and trained
personality, is drawn into pursuits and
interests quite alien to those of his family.
This attempt to take the parental relation
somewhat away from mere personal expe-
rience, as well as the increasing tendency
of parents to share their children's pur-
suits and interests, will doubtless finally
result in a better understanding of the
social obligation. The understanding, which
results from identity of interests, would
seem to confirm the conviction that in the
complicated life of to-day there is no
education so admirable as that education
which comes from participation in the con-
stant trend of events. There is no doubt
that most of the misunderstandings of life
are due to partial intelligence, because our
experiences have been so unlike that we
cannot comprehend each other. The old
93
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
difficulties incident to the clash of two
codes of morals must drop away, as the
experiences of various members of the
family become larger and more identical.
At the present moment, however, many of
those difficulties still exist and may be seen
all about us. In order to illustrate the
situation baldly, and at the same time to
put it dramatically, it may be well to take
an instance concerning which we have no
personal feeling. The tragedy of King
Lear has been selected, although we have
been accustomed so long to give him our
sympathy as the victim of the ingratitude
of his two older daughters, and of the
apparent coldness of Cordelia, that we
have not sufficiently considered the weak-
ness of his fatherhood, revealed by the fact
that he should get himself into so entangled
and unhappy a relation to all of his chil-
dren. In our pity for Lear, we fail
to analyze his character. The King on
his throne exhibits utter lack of self-
control. The King in the storm gives way
94
FILIAL RELATIONS
to the same emotion, in repining over
the wickedness of his children, which he
formerly exhibited in his indulgent treat-
ment of them.
It might be illuminating to discover
wherein he had failed, and why his old
age found him roofless in spite of the fact
that he strenuously urged the family claim
with his whole conscience. At the open-
ing of the drama he sat upon his throne,
ready for the enjoyment which an indul-
gent parent expects when he has given
gifts to his children. From the two elder,
the responses for the division of his lands
were graceful and fitting, but he longed
to hear what Cordelia, his youngest and
best beloved child, would say. He looked
toward her expectantly, but instead of
delight and gratitude there was the first
dawn of character. Cordelia made the
awkward attempt of an untrained soul to
be honest and scrupulously to express
her inmost feeling. The king was baffled
and distressed by this attempt at self-
95
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
expression. It was new to him that his
daughter should be moved by a principle
obtained outside himself, which even his
imagination could not follow; that she had
caught the notion of an existence in which
her relation as a daughter played but a
part. She was transformed by a dignity
which recast her speech and made it self-
contained. She found herself in the sweep
of a feeling so large that the immediate
loss of a kingdom seemed of little conse-
quence to her. Even an act which might
be construed as disrespect to her father was
justified in her eyes, because she was vainly
striving to fill out this larger conception
of duty. The test which comes sooner or
later to many parents had come to Lear, to
maintain the tenderness of the relation
between father and child, after that rela-
tion had become one between adults, to be
content with the responses made by the
adult child to the family claim, while at
the same time she responded to the claims
of the rest of life. The mind of Lear was
96
FILIAL RELATIONS
not big enough for this test; he failed
to see anything but the personal slight
involved, and the ingratitude alone
reached him. It was impossible for him
to calmly watch his child developing
beyond the stretch of his own mind and
sympathy.
That a man should be so absorbed in his
own indignation as to fail to apprehend his
child's thought, that he should lose his af-
fection in his anger, simply reveals the fact
that his own emotions are dearer to him
than his sense of paternal obligation. Lear
apparently also ignored the common ances-
try of Cordelia and himself, and forgot her
royal inheritance of magnanimity. He had
thought of himself so long as a noble and
indulgent father that he had lost the fac-
ulty by which he might perceive himself
in the wrong. Even in the midst of the
storm he declared himself more sinned
against than sinning. He could believe
any amount of kindness and goodness of
himself, but could imagine no fidelity on
H 97
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
the part of Cordelia unless she gave him
the sign he demanded.
At length he suffered many hardships;
his spirit was buffeted and broken ; he
lost his reason as well as his kingdom;
but for the first time his experience was
identical with the experience of the men
around him, and he came to a larger con-
ception of life. He put himself in the place
of " the poor naked wretches," and un-
expectedly found healing and comfort. He
took poor Tim in his arms from a sheer
desire for human contact and animal warmth,
a primitive and genuine need, through which
he suddenly had a view of the world which
he had never had from his throne, and
from this moment his heart began to turn
toward Cordelia.
In reading the tragedy of King Lear,
Cordelia receives a full share of our cen-
sure. Her first words are cold, and we are
shocked by her lack of tenderness. Why
should she ignore her father's need for in-
dulgence, and be unwilling to give him
98
FILIAL RELATIONS
what he so obviously craved ? We see in
the old king "the over-mastering desire of
being beloved, selfish, and yet characteristic
of the selfishness of a loving and kindly
nature alone." His eagerness produces in
us a strange pity for him, and we are im-
patient that his youngest and best-beloved
child cannot feel this, even in the midst of
her search for truth and her newly acquired
sense of a higher duty. It seems to us a
narrow conception that would break thus
abruptly with the past and would assume
that her father had no part in the new life.
We want to remind her "that pity, mem-
ory, and faithfulness are natural ties," and
surely as much to be prized as is the devel-
opment of her own soul. We do not admire
the Cordelia who through her self-absorp-
tion deserts her father, as we later admire
the same woman who comes back from
France that she may include her father in
her happiness and freer life. The first had
selfishly taken her salvation for herself alone,
and it was not until her conscience had de-
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DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
veloped in her new life that she was driven
back to her father, where she perished,
drawn into the cruelty and wrath which
had now become objective and tragic.
Historically considered, the relation of
Lear to his children was archaic and bar-
baric, indicating merely the beginning of
a family life since developed. His paternal
expression was one of domination and indul-
gence, without the perception of the needs
of his children, without any anticipation of
their entrance into a wider life, or any belief
that they could have a worthy life apart
from him. If that rudimentary conception
of family life ended in such violent disaster,
the fact that we have learned to be more
decorous in our conduct does not demon-
strate that by following the same line of
theory we may not reach a like misery.
Wounded affection there is sure to be,
but this could be reduced to a modicum if
we could preserve a sense of the relation of
the individual to the family, and of the latter
to society, and if we had been given a code
lOO
FILIAL RELATIONS
of ethics dealing with these larger relation-
ships, instead of a code designed to apply
so exclusively to relationships obtaining only
between individuals.
Doubtless the clashes and jars which we
all feel most keenly are those which occur
when two standards of morals, both honestly
held and believed in, are brought sharply
together. The awkwardness and constraint
we experience when two standards of con-
ventions and manners clash but feebly pre-
figure this deeper difference.
lOI
CHAPTER IV
Household Adjustment
If we could only be judged or judge other
people by purity of motive, life would be
much simplified, but that would be to aban-
don the contention made in the first chapter,
that the processes of life are as important as
its aims. We can all recall acquaintances of
whose integrity of purpose we can have no
doubt, but who cause much confusion as
they proceed to the accomplishment of that
purpose, who indeed are often insensible to
their own mistakes and harsh in their judg-
ments of other people because they are so
confident of their own inner integrity.
This tendency to be so sure of integrity
of purpose as to be unsympathetic and hard-
ened to the means by which it is accom-
plished, is perhaps nowhere so obvious as
I02
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
in the household itself. It nowhere operates
as so constant a force as in the minds of
the women who in all the perplexity of in-
dustrial transition are striving to administer
domestic affairs. The ethics held by themi
are for the most part the individual and
family codes, untouched by the larger social
conceptions.
These women, rightly confident of their
household and family integrity and holding
to their own code of morals, fail to see the
household in its social aspect. Possibly no
relation has been so slow to respond to the
social ethics which we are now considering, as
that between the household employer and the
household employee, or, as it is still sometimes
called, that between mistress and servant.
This persistence of the individual code
in relation to the household may be partly
accounted for by the fact that orderly life
and, in a sense, civilization itself, grew from
the concentration of interest in one place,
and that moral feeling first became centred
in a limited number of persons. From the
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DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
familiar proposition that the home began be-
f) cause the mother was obhged to stay in one
spot in order to cherish the child, we can see
a foundation for the belief that if women are
much away from home, the home itself will be
destroyed and all ethical progress endangered.
We have further been told that the earli-
est dances and social gatherings were most
questionable in their purposes, and that it
was, therefore, the good and virtuous women
who first stayed at home, until gradually the
two — the woman who stayed at home and
the woman who guarded her virtue — became
synonymous. A code of ethics was thus
developed in regard to woman's conduct,
and her duties were logically and carefully
limited to her own family circle. When it
became impossible to adequately minister to
the needs of this circle without the help of
many people who did not strictly belong to
the family, although they were part of the
household, they were added as aids merely
for supplying these needs. When women
were the brewers and bakers, the fullers,
104
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
dyers, spinners, and weavers, the soap and
candle makers, they administered large in-
dustries, but solely from the family point
of view. Only a few hundred years ago,
woman had complete control of the manu-
facturing of many commodities which now
figure so largely in commerce, and it is evi-
dent that she let the manufacturing of these
commodities go into the hands of men, as
soon as organization and a larger concep-
tion of their production were required. She
felt no responsibility for their management
when they were taken from the home to the
factory, for deeper than her instinct to manu-
facture food and clothing for her family was
her instinct to stay with them, and by iso-
lation and care to guard them from evil.
She had become convinced that a woman's
duty extended only to her own family, and
that the world outside had no claim upon
her. The British matron ordered her
maidens aright, when they were spinning
under her own roof, but she felt no com-
punction of conscience when the morals
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and health of young girls were endangered
in the overcrowded and insanitary factories.
The code of family ethics was established
in her mind so firmly that it excluded any
notion of social effort.
It is quite possible to accept this expla-
nation of the origin of morals, and to believe
that the preservation of the home is at the
foundation of all that is best in civiliza-
tion, without at the same time insisting
that the separate preparation and serving
of food is an inherent part of the structure
and sanctity of the home, or that those
who minister to one household shall minis-
ter to that exclusively. But to make this
distinction seems difficult, and almost in-
variably the sense of obligation to the
family becomes confused with a certain
sort of domestic management. The moral
issue involved in one has become inextri-
cably combined with the industrial difficulty
involved in the other, and it is at this
point that so many perplexed housekeep-
ers, through the confusion of the two
io6
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
problems, take a difficult and untenable
position.
There are economic as well as ethical
reasons for this survival of a simpler code.
The wife of a workingman still has a
distinct economic value to her husband.
She cooks, cleans, washes, and mends — ser-
vices for which, before his marriage, he paid
ready money. The wife of the successful
business or professional man does not do
this. He continues to pay for his cooking,
house service, and washing. The mending,
however, is still largely performed by his
wife ; indeed, the stockings are pathetically
retained and their darning given an exag-
gerated importance, as if women instinc-
tively felt that these mended stockings
were the last remnant of the entire house-
hold industry, of which they were formerly
mistresses. But one industry, the cooking
and serving of foods to her own family,
woman has never relinquished. It has,
therefore, n^ver been organized, either by
men or women, and is in an undeveloped
107
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
state. Each employer of household labor
views it solely from the family standpoint.
The ethics prevailing in regard to it are
distinctly personal and unsocial, and result
in the unique isolation of the household
employee.
As industrial conditions have changed,
the household has simplified, from the
mediaeval affair of journeymen, apprentices,
and maidens who spun and brewed to the
family proper; to those who love each
other and live together in ties of affection
and consanguinity. Were this process com-
plete, we should have no problem of house-
hold employment. But, even in households
comparatively humble, there is still one
alien, one who is neither loved nor loving.
The modern family has dropped the man
who made its shoes, the woman who spun
its clothes, and, to a large extent, the
woman who washes them, but it stoutly
refuses to drop the woman who cooks its
food and ministers directly to its individ-
ual comfort; it strangely insists that to do
io8
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
that would be to destroy the family life
itself. The cook is uncomfortable, the
family is uncomfortable; but it will not
drop her as all her fellow-workers have
been dropped, although the cook herself
insists upon it. So far has this insistence
gone that every possible concession is made
to retain her. The writer knows an em-
ployer in one of the suburbs who built a
bay at the back of her house so that her cook
might have a pleasant room in which to
sleep, and another in which to receive her
friends. This employer naturally felt ag-
grieved when the cook refused to stay in
her bay. Viewed in an historic light, this
employer might quite as well have added a
bay to her house for her shoemaker, and
then deemed him ungrateful because he
declined to live in it.
A listener, attentive to a conversation be-
tween two employers of household labor, —
and we certainly all have opportunity to hear
such conversations, — would often discover a
tone jmplying that the employer was abused
109
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and put upon; that she was struggling with the
problem solely because she was thus serving
her family and performing her social duties ;
that otherwise it would be a great relief to her
to abandon the entire situation, and " never
have a servant in her house again." Did
she follow this impulse, she would simply
yield to the trend of her times and accept
the present system of production. She would
be in line with the industrial organization
of her age. Were she in line ethically, she
would have to believe that the sacredness
and beauty of family life do not consist in
the processes of the separate preparation of
food, but in sharing the corporate life of the
community, and in making the family the
unit of that life.
The selfishness of a modern mistress, who,
in her narrow social ethics, insists that those
who minister to the comforts of her family
shall minister to it alone, that they shall not
only be celibate, but shall be cut off, more or
less, from their natural social ties, excludes
the best working-people from her service.
no
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
A man of dignity and ability is quite will-
ing to come into a house to tune a piano.
Another man of mechanical skill will come
to put up window shades. Another of less
skill, but of perfect independence, will come
to clean and relay a carpet. These men
would all resent the situation and consider
it quite impossible if it implied the giving
up of their family and social ties, and living
under the roof of the household requiring
their services.
The isolation of the household employee
is perhaps inevitable so long as the employer
holds her belated ethics; but the situation
is made even more difficult by the character
and capacity of the girls who enter this
industry. In any great industrial change
the workmen who are permanently displaced
are those who are too dull to seize upon
changed conditions. The workmen who
have knowledge and insight, who are in
touch with their time, quickly reorganize.
The general statement may be made that
the enterprising girls of the community go
III
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
into factories, and the less enterprising go
into households, although there are many
exceptions. It is not a question of skill, of
energy, of conscientious work, which will
make a girl rise industrially while she is in
the household ; she is not in the rising move-
ment. She is belated in a class composed
of the unprogressive elements of the com-
munity, which is recruited constantly by
those from the ranks of the incompetent,
by girls who are learning the language, girls
who are timid and slow, or girls who look
at life solely from the savings-bank point
of view. The distracted housekeeper strug-
gles with these unprogressive girls, holding
to them not even the well-defined and inde-
pendent relation of employer and employed,
but the hazy and constantly changing one
of mistress to servant.
The latter relation is changing under
pressure from various directions. In our
increasing democracy the notion of personal
service is constantly becoming more dis-
tasteful, conflicting, as it does, with the more
112
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
modern notion of personal dignity. Personal
ministration to the needs of childhood, ill-
ness, and old age seem to us reasonable, and
the democratic adjustment in regard to them
is being made. The first two are constantly
raised nearer to the level of a profession, and
there is little doubt that the third will soon
follow. But personal ministrations to a nor-
mal, healthy adult, consuming the time and
energy of another adult, we find more difficult
to reconcile to our theories of democracy.
A factory employer parts with his men at
the factory gates at the end of a day's work ;
they go to their homes as he goes to his, in
the assumption that they both do what they
want and spend their money as they please ;
but this solace of equality outside of working
hours is denied the bewildered employer of
household labor.
She is obliged to live constantly in the
same house with her employee, and because
of certain equalities in food and shelter she
is brought more sharply face to face with
the mental and social inequalities.
I 113
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
The difficulty becomes more apparent as
the character of the work performed by the
so-called servant is less absolutely useful and
may be merely time consuming. A kind-
hearted woman who will complacently take
an afternoon drive, leaving her cook to pre-
pare the five courses of a "little dinner for
only ten guests," will not be nearly so com-
fortable the next evening when she speeds
her daughter to a dance, conscious that her
waitress must spend the evening in dull soli-
tude on the chance that a caller or two may
ring the door-bell.
A conscientious employer once remarked
to the writer: " In England it must be much
easier; the maid does not look and dress so
like your daughter, and you can at least pre-
tend that she doesn't like the same things.
But really, my new waitress is quite as
pretty and stylish as my daughter is, and her
wistful look sometimes when Mary goes off
to a frolic quite breaks my heart."
Too many employers of domestic service
have always been exempt from manual labor,
114
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
and therefore constantly impose exacting du-
ties upon employees, the nature of which they
do not understand by experience ; there is
thus no curb of rationality imposed upon the
employer's requirements and demands. She
is totally unlike the foreman in a shop, who
has only risen to his position by way of hav-
ing actually performed with his own hands
all the work of the men he directs. There
is also another class of employers of do-
mestic labor, who grow capricious and
over-exacting through sheer lack of larger
interests to occupy their minds ; it is equally
bad for them and the employee that the
duties of the latter are not clearly defined.
Tolstoy contends that an exaggerated notion
of cleanliness has developed among such
employers, which could never have been
evolved among usefully employed people.
He points to the fact that a serving man, in
order that his hands may be immaculately
clean, is kept from performing the heavier
work of the household, and then is supplied
with a tray, upon which to place a card, in
"5
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
order that even his clean hands may not
touch it ; later, even his clean hands are cov-
ered with a pair of clean white gloves, which
hold the tray upon which the card is placed.
If it were not for the undemocratic ethics
used by the employers of domestics, much
work now performed in the household would
be done outside, as is true of many products
formerly manufactured in the feudal house-
hold. The worker in all other trades has
complete control of his own time after the
performance of definitely limited services, his
wages are paid altogether in money which he
may spend in the maintenance of a separate
home life, and he has full opportunity to
organize with the other workers in his trade.
The domestic employee is retained in the
household largely because her " mistress "
fatuously believes that she is thus maintain-
ing the sanctity of family life.
The household employee has no regular
opportunity for meeting other workers of her
trade, and of attaining with them the dignity
of a corporate body. The industrial isola-
ii6
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
tion of the household employee results, as
isolation in a trade must always result, in a
lack of progress in the methods and products
of that trade, and a lack of aspiration and
education in the workman. Whether we
recognize this isolation as a cause or not, we
are all ready to acknowledge that household
labor has been in some way belated; that
the improvements there have not kept up
with the improvement in other occupations.
It is said that the last revolution in the
processes of cooking was brought about
by Count Rumford, who died a hundred
years ago. This is largely due to the lack
of esprit de corps among the employees,
which keeps them collectively from fresh
achievements, as the absence of education in
the individual keeps her from improving her
implements.
Under this isolation, not only must one
set of utensils serve divers purposes, and,
as a consequence, tend to a lessened vol-
ume and lower quality of work, but, in-
asmuch as the appliances are not made
117
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
to perform the fullest work, there is an
amount of capital invested disproportionate
to the product when measured by the achieve-
ment in other branches of industry. More
important than this is the result of the
isolation upon the worker herself. There
is nothing more devastating to the inven-
tive faculty, nor fatal to a flow of mind
and spirit, than the constant feeling of
loneliness and the absence of that fellow-
ship which makes our public opinion. If
an angry foreman reprimands a girl for
breaking a machine, twenty other girls
hear him, and the culprit knows perfectly
well their opinion as to the justice or in-
justice of her situation. In either case she
bears it better for knowing that, and not
thinking it over in solitude. If a house-
hold employee breaks a utensil or a piece
of porcelain and is reprimanded by her
employer, too often the invisible jury is
the family of the latter, who naturally up-
hold her censorious position and intensify
the feeling of loneliness in the employee.
ii8
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
The household employee, in addition to
her industrial isolation, is also isolated
socially. It is well to remember that the
household employees for the better quar-
ters of the city and suburbs are largely
drawn from the poorer quarters, which are
nothing if not gregarious. The girl is
born and reared in a tenement house full
of children. She goes to school with them,
and there she learns to march, to read, and
write in companionship with forty others.
When she is old enough to go to parties,
those she attends are usually held in a
public hall and are crowded with dancers.
If she works in a factory, she walks home
with many other girls, in much the same
spirit as she formerly walked to school
with them. She mingles with the young
men she knows, in frank, economic, and
social equality. Until she marries she re-
mains at home with no special break or
change in her family and social life. If
she is employed in a household, this is not
true. Suddenly all the conditions of her
119
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
life are altered. This change may be
wholesome for her, but it is not easy, and
thought of the savings-bank does not
cheer one much, when one is twenty.
She is isolated from the people with
whom she has been reared, with whom she
has gone to school, and among whom she
expects to live when she marries. She is
naturally lonely and constrained away from
them, and the " new maid " often seems
"queer" to her employer's family. She
does not care to mingle socially with the
people in whose house she is employed,
as the girl from the country often does,
but she suffers horribly from loneliness.
This wholesome, instinctive dread of social
isolation is so strong that, as every city
intelligence-office can testify, the filling of
situations is easier, or more difficult, in
proportion as the place offers more or
less companionship. Thus, the easy situa-
tion to fill is always the city house, with
five or six employees, shading off into the
more difficult suburban home, with two,
I20
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
and the utterly impossible lonely country
house.
There are suburban employers of house-
hold labor who make heroic efforts to
supply domestic and social life to their
employees ; who take the domestic employee
to drive, arrange to have her invited out
occasionally ; who supply her with books
and papers and companionship. Nothing
could be more praiseworthy in motive, but
it is seldom successful in actual operation,
resulting as it does in a simulacrum of
companionship. The employee may have
a genuine friendship for her employer, and
a pleasure in her companionship, or she
may not have, and the unnaturalness of the
situation comes from the insistence that she
has, merely because of the propinquity.
The unnaturalness of the situation is
intensified by the fact that the employee
is practically debarred by distance and
lack of leisure from her natural associates,
and that her employer sympathetically in-
sists upon filling the vacancy in interests
121
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and affections by her own tastes and friend-
ship. She may or may not succeed, but the
employee should not be thus dependent
upon the good will of her employer. That
in itself is undemocratic.
The difficulty is increasing by a sense of
social discrimination which the household
employee keenly feels is against her and in
favor of the factory girls, in the minds of the
young men of her acquaintance. Women
seeking employment, understand perfectly
well this feeling among mechanics, doubtless
quite unjustifiable, but it acts as a strong in-
ducement toward factory labor. The writer
has long ceased to apologize for the views and
opinions of working people, being quite sure
that on the whole they are quite as wise and
quite as foolish as the views and opinions
of other people, but that this particularly
foolish opinion of young mechanics is widely
shared by the employing class can be easily
demonstrated. The contrast is further ac-
centuated by the better social position of the
factory girl, and the advantages provided for
122
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
her in the way of lunch clubs, social clubs,
and vacation homes, from which girls per-
forming household labor are practically
excluded by their hours of work, their geo-
graphical situation, and a curious feeling
that they are not as interesting as factory
girls.
This separation from her natural social
ties affects, of course, her opportunity for
family life. It is well to remember that
women, as a rule, are devoted to their
families ; that they want to live with their
parents, their brothers and sisters, and kins-
folk, and will sacrifice much to accomplish
this. This devotion is so universal that it
is impossible to ignore it when we consider
women as employees. Young unmarried
women are not detached from family claims
and requirements as young men are, and
are more ready and steady in their response
to the needs of aged parents and the help-
less members of the family. But women
performing labor in households have peculiar
difficulties in responding to their family
123
)\)
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
claims, and are practically dependent upon
their employers for opportunities of even
seeing their relatives and friends.
Curiously enough the same devotion to
family life and quick response to its claims,
on the part of the employer, operates against
the girl employed in household labor, and still
further contributes to her isolation.
The employer of household labor, in her
zeal to preserve her own family life intact and
free from intrusion, acts inconsistently and
grants to her cook, for instance, but once or
twice a week, such opportunity for untram-
melled association with her relatives as the
employer's family claims constantly. This in
itself is undemocratic, in that it makes a dis-
tinction between the value of family life for
one set of people as over against another;
or, rather, claims that one set of people are
of so much less importance than another,
that a valuable side of life pertaining to
them should be sacrificed for the other.
This cannot be defended theoretically, and
no doubt much of the talk among the em-
124
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
ployers of household labor, that their em-
ployees are carefully shielded and cared for,
and that it is so much better for a girl's health
and morals to work in a household than to
work in a factory, comes from a certain uneasi-
ness of conscience, and from a desire to make
up by individual scruple what would be done
much more freely and naturally by public
opinion if it had an untrammelled chance to
assert itself. One person, or a number of
isolated persons, however conscientious, can-
not perform this office of public opinion.
Certain hospitals in London have con-
tributed statistics showing that seventy-eight
per cent of illegitimate children born there
are the children of girls working in house-
holds. These girls are certainly not less
virtuous than factory girls, for they come
from the same families and have had the
same training, but the girls who remain at
home and work in factories meet their lovers
naturally and easily, their fathers and broth-
ers know the men, and unconsciously ex-
ercise a certain supervision and a certain
125
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
direction in their choice of companionship.
The household employees living in another
part of the city, away from their natural
family and social ties, depend upon chance
for the lovers whom they meet. The lover
may be the young man who delivers for the
butcher or grocer, or the solitary friend,
who follows the girl from hei: own part of
town and pursues unfairly the advantage
which her social loneliness and isolation
afford him. There is no available public
opinion nor any standard of convention which
the girl can apply to her own situation.
It would be easy to point out many incon-
veniences arising from the fact that the old
economic forms are retained when moral
conditions which befitted them have en-
tirely disappeared, but until employers of
domestic labor become conscious of their
narrow code of ethics, and make a distinct
effort to break through the status of mis-
tress and servant, because it shocks their
moral sense, there is no chance of even
beginning a reform.
ia6
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
A fuller social and domestic life among
household employees would be steps toward
securing their entrance into the larger
industrial organizations by which the needs
of a community are most successfully admin-
istered. Many a girl who complains of
loneliness, and who relinquishes her situ-
ation with that as her sole excuse, feebly
tries to formulate her sense of restraint and
social mal-adjustment. She sometimes says
that she "feels so unnatural all the time."
The writer has known the voice of a girl
to change so much during three weeks of
" service " that she could not recognize it
when the girl returned to her home. It
alternated between the high falsetto in
which a shy child "speaks a piece" and
the husky gulp with which the globus hys-
tericus is swallowed. The alertness and
bonhomie of the voice of the tenement-
house child had totally disappeared. When
such a girl leaves her employer, her reasons
are often incoherent and totally incompre-
hensible to that good lady, who naturally
127
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
concludes that she wishes to get away from
the work and back to her dances and giddy
life, content, if she has these, to stand many
hours in an insanitary factory. The charge
of the employer is only half a truth. These
dances may be the only organized form of
social life which the disheartened employee
is able to mention, but the girl herself, in
her discontent and her moving from place
to place, is blindly striving to respond to a
larger social life. Her employer thinks that
she should be able to consider only the in-
terests and conveniences of her employer's
family, because the employer herself is hold-
ing to a family outlook, and refuses to allow
her mind to take in the larger aspects of the
situation.
Although this household industry sur-
vives in the midst of the factory system, it
must, of course, constantly compete with
it. Women with little children, or those
with invalids depending upon them, cannot
enter either occupation, and they are prac-
tically confined to the sewing trades; but
128
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
to all other untrained women seeking em-
ployment a choice is open between these
two forms of labor.
There are few women so dull that they
cannot paste labels on a box, or do some
form of factory work ; few so dull that some
perplexed housekeeper will not receive them,
at least for a trial, in her household. House-
hold labor, then, has to compete with factory
labor, and women seeking employment, more
or less consciously compare these two forms
of labor in point of hours, in point of per-
manency of employment, in point of wages,
and in point of the advantage they afford
for family and social life. Three points are
easily disposed of. First, in regard to hours,
there is no doubt that the factory has the
advantage. The average factory hours are
from seven in the morning to six in the
evening, with the chance of working over-
time in busy seasons. This leaves most of
the evenings and Sundays entirely free. The
average hours of household labor are from
six in the morning until eight at night, with
K 129
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
little difference in seasons. There is one
afternoon a week, with an occasional even-
ing, but Sunday is seldom wholly free.
Even these evenings and afternoons take
the form of a concession from the employer.
They are called "evenings out," as if the
time really belonged to her, but that she
was graciously permitting her employee to
use it. This attitude, of course, is in marked
contrast to that maintained by the factory
operative, who, when she works evenings
is paid for " over-time."
Second, in regard to permanency of posi-
tion, the advantage is found clearly on the
side of the household employee, if she proves
in any measure satisfactory to her employer,
for she encounters much less competition.
Third, in point of wages, the household
is again fairly ahead, if we consider not the
money received, but the opportunity offered
for saving money. This is greater among
household employees, because they do not
pay board, the clothing required is simpler,
and the temptation to spend money in
130
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
recreation is less frequent. The minimum
wages paid an adult in household labor
may be fairly put at two dollars and a half a
week; the maximum at six dollars, this ex-
cluding the comparatively rare opportunities
for women to cook at forty dollars a month,
and the housekeeper's position at fifty dollars
a month.
The factory wages, viewed from the savings-
bank point of view, may be smaller in the aver-
age, but this is doubtless counterbalanced in
the minds of the employees by the greater
chance which the factory offers for increased
wages. A girl over sixteen seldom works
in a factory for less than four dollars a
week, and always cherishes the hope of at
last being a forewoman with a permanent
salary of from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a
week. Whether she attains this or not, she
runs a fair chance of earning ten dollars a
week as a skilled worker. A girl finds it
easier to be content with three dollars a
week, when she pays for board, in a scale of
wages rising toward ten dollars, than to be
131
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
content with four dollars a week and pay no
board, in a scale of wages rising toward six
dollars ; and the girl well knows that there
are scores of forewomen at sixty dollars a
month for one forty-dollar cook or fifty-dollar
housekeeper. In many cases this position is
well taken economically, for, although the
opportunity for saving may be better for the
employees in the household than in the fac-
tory, her family saves more when she works
in a factory and lives with them. The rent is
no more when she is at home. The two
dollars and a half a week which she pays into
the family fund more than covers the cost of
her actual food, and at night she can often
contribute toward the family labor by help-
ing her mother wash and sew.
The fourth point has already been consid-
ered, and if the premise in regard to the isola-
tion of the household employee is well taken,
and if the position can be sustained that this
isolation proves the determining factor in the
situation, then certainly an effort should be
made to remedy this, at least in its domestic
132
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
and social aspects. To allow household em-
ployees to live with their own families and
among their own friends, as factory employees
now do, would be to relegate more production
to industrial centres administered on the fac-
tory system, and to secure shorter hours for
that which remains to be done in the house-
hold.
In those cases in which the household
employees have no family ties, doubtless a
remedy against social isolation would be the
formation of residence clubs, at least in the
suburbs, where the isolation is most keenly
felt. Indeed, the beginnings of these clubs
are already seen in the servants' quarters
at the summer hotels. In these residence
clubs, the household employee could have the
independent life which only one's own abid-
ing place can afford. This, of course, pre-
supposes a higher grade of ability than
household employees at present possess ; on
the other hand, it is only by offering such
possibilities that the higher grades of intelli-
gence can be secured for household employ-
133
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
ment. As the plan of separate clubs for
household employees will probably come
first in the suburbs, where the difficulty of
securing and holding " servants " under the
present system is most keenly felt, so the
plan of buying cooked food from an outside
kitchen, and of having more and more of the
household product relegated to the factory,
will probably come from the comparatively
poor people in the city, who feel most keenly
the pressure of the present system. They
already consume a much larger proportion
of canned goods and bakers' wares and
" prepared meats " than the more prosperous
people do, because they cannot command
the skill nor the time for the more tedious
preparation of the raw material. The writer
has seen a tenement-house mother pass by
a basket of green peas at the door of a local
grocery store, to purchase a tin of canned peas,
because they could be easily prepared for sup-
per and " the children liked the tinny taste."
It is comparatively easy for an employer
to manage her household industry with a
134
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT
cook, a laundress, a waitress. The difficul-
ties really begin when the family income
is so small that but one person can be em-
ployed in the household for all these varied
functions, and the difficulties increase and
grow almost insurmountable as they fall
altogether upon the mother of the family,
who is living in a flat, or, worse still, in a
tenement house, where one stove and one set
of utensils must be put to all sorts of uses, fit
or unfit, making the living room of the family
a horror in summer, and perfectly insupport-
able on rainy washing-days in winter. Such
a woman, rather than the prosperous house-
keeper, uses factory products, and thus no
high standard of quality is established.
The problem of domestic service, which
has long been discussed in the United
States and England, is now coming to
prominence in France. As a well-known
economist has recently pointed out, the large
defection in the ranks of domestics is there
regarded as a sign of revolt against an
"unconscious slavery," while English and
135
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
American writers appeal to the statistics
which point to the absorption of an enor-
mous number of the class from which ser-
vants were formerly recruited into factory
employments, and urge, as the natural solu-
tion, that more of the products used in
households be manufactured in factories,
and that personal service, at least for
healthy adults, be eliminated altogether.
Both of these lines of discussion certainly
indicate that domestic service is yielding
to the influence of a democratic move-
ment, and is emerging from the narrower
code of family ethics into the larger code
governing social relations. It still remains
to express the ethical advance through
changed economic conditions by which the
actual needs of the family may be supplied
not only more effectively but more in line
with associated effort. To fail to apprehend
the tendency of one's age, and to fail to adapt
the conditions of an industry to it, is to leave
that industry ill-adjusted and belated on the
economic side, and out of line ethically.
136
CHAPTER V
Industrial Amelioration
There is no doubt that the great diffi-
culty we experience in reducing to action
our imperfect code of social ethics arises
from the fact that we have not yet learned
to act together, and find it far from easy even
to fuse our principles and aims into a satis-
factory statement. We have all been at
times entertained by the futile efforts of
half a dozen highly individualized people
gathered together as a committee. Their
aimless attempts to find a common method
of action have recalled the wavering mo-
tion of a baby's arm before he has learned
to coordinate his muscles.
If, as is many times stated, we are pass- — Aa"
ing from an age of individualism to one of
association, there is no doubt that for de-
137
Y\\
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
cisive and effective action the individual
still has the best of it. He will secure effi-
cient results while committees are still de-
liberating upon the best method of making
a beginning. And yet, if the need of the
times demand associated effort, it may easily
be true that the action which appears inef-
fective, and yet is carried out upon the more
highly developed line of associated effort,
may represent a finer social quality and
have a greater social value than the more
effective individual action. It is possible
that an individual may be successful, largely
because he conserves all his powers for in-
dividual achievement and does not put any
of his energy into the training which will
give him the ability to act with others.
The individual acts promptly, and we are
dazzled by his success while only dimly
conscious of the inadequacy of his code.
Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly
than in industrial relations, as existing be-
tween the owner of a large factory and his
employees.
138
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
A growing conflict may be detected be- <:_(tolv
tween the democratic ideal, which urges V^^-^"
the workmen to demand representation in
the administration of industry, and the
accepted position, that the man who owns
the capital and takes the risks has the
exclusive right of management. It is in
reality a clash between individual or aris-
tocratic management, and corporate or
democratic management. A large and
highly developed factory presents a sharp
contrast between its socialized form and
individualistic ends.
It is possible to illustrate this difference
by a series of events which occurred in
Chicago during the summer of 1894.
These events epitomized and exaggerated,
but at the same time challenged, the code
of ethics which regulates much of our
daily conduct, and clearly showed that so-
called social relations are often resting
upon the will of an individual, and are in
reality regulated by a code of individual
ethics.
139
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
As this situation illustrates a point of
great difficulty to which we have arrived ia
our development of social ethics, it may be
justifiable to discuss it at some length. Let
us recall the facts, not as they have been
investigated and printed, but as they remain
in our memories.
A large manufacturing company had
provided commodious workshops, and, at
the instigation of its president, had built
a model town for the use of its employees.
After a series of years it was deemed nec-
essary, during a financial depression, to
reduce the wages of these employees by
giving each workman less than full-time
work " in order to keep the shops open."
This reduction was not accepted by the
men, who had become discontented with
the factory management and the town
regulations, and a strike ensued, followed
by a complete shut-down of the works.
Although these shops were non-union
shops, the strikers were hastily organized
and appealed for help to the American
140
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
Railway Union, which at that moment
was holding its biennial meeting in Chicago.
After some days' discussion and some
futile attempts at arbitration, a sympathetic
strike was declared, which gradually in-
volved railway men in all parts of the
country, and orderly transportation was
brought to a complete standstill. In the
excitement which followed, cars were burned
and tracks torn up. The police of Chicago
did not cope with the disorder, and the
railway companies, apparently distrusting
the Governor of the State, and in order
to protect the United States mails, called
upon the President of the United States
for the federal troops, the federal courts
further enjoined all persons against any
form of interference with the property or
operation of the railroads, and the situa-
tion gradually assumed the proportions of
internecine warfare. During all of these
events the president of the manufacturing
company first involved, steadfastly refused
to have the situation submitted to arbitra-
141
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
tion, and this attitude naturally provoked
much discussion. The discussion was
broadly divided between those who held
that the long kindness of the president
of the company had been most ungrate-
fully received, and those who maintained
that the situation was the inevitable out-
come of the social consciousness develop-
ing among working people. The first
defended the president of the company in
his persistent refusal to arbitrate, main-
taining that arbitration was impossible after
the matter had been taken up by other
than his own employees, and they declared
that a man must be allowed to run his own
business. They considered the firm stand
of the president a service to the manu-
facturing interests of the entire country.
/ The others claimed that a large manu-
facturing concern has ceased to be a pri-
vate matter; that not only a number of
workmen and stockholders are concerned
in its management, but that the interests
of the public are so involved that the
142
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
officers of the company are in a real sense
administering a public trust.
This prolonged strike clearly puts in a
concrete form the ethics of an individual,
in this case a benevolent employer, and
the ethics of a mass of men, his employees,
claiming what they believed to be their
moral rights.
These events illustrate the difficulty of
managing an industry which has become
organized into a vast social operation, not
with the cooperation of the workman thus
socialized, but solely by the dictation of
the individual owning the capital. There
is a sharp divergence between the social
form and the individual aim, which becomes
greater as the employees are more highly
socialized and dependent. The president of
the company under discussion went further
than the usual employer does. He social-
ized not only the factory, but the form in
which his workmen were living. He built,
and in a great measure regulated, an entire
town, without calling upon the workmen
143
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
either for self-expression or self-goVernment.
He honestly believed that he knew better
than they what was for their good, as he
certainly knew better than they how to con-
duct his business. As his factory developed
and increased, making money each year
under his direction, he naturally expected
the town to prosper in the same way.
He did not realize that the men sub-
^ mitted to the undemocratic conditions of
the factory organization because the eco-
nomic pressure in our industrial affairs is
so great that they could not do otherwise.
Under this pressure they could be success-
fully discouraged from organization, and
systematically treated on the individual
basis.
Social life, however, in spite of class distinc-
tions, is much freer than industrial life, and
the men resented the extension of industrial
control to domestic and social arrangements.
They felt the lack of democracy in the as-
sumption that they should be taken care of
in these matters, in which even the humblest
144
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
workman has won his independence. The
basic difficulty lay in the fact that an in-
dividual was directing the social affairs of
many men without any consistent effort to
find out their desires, and without any organ-
ization through which to give them social
expression. The president of the company
was, moreover, so confident of the righteous-
ness of his aim that he had come to test
the righteousness of the process by his own
feelings and not by those of the men. He
doubtless built the town from a sincere
desire to give his employees the best sur-
roundings. As it developed, he gradually
took toward it the artist attitude toward
his own creation, which has no thought
for the creation itself but is absorbed in
the idea it stands for, and he ceased to
measure the usefulness of the town by the
standard of the men's needs. This process
slowly darkened his glints of memory,
which might have connected his experi-
ence with that of his men. It is possible
to cultivate the impulses of the benefactor
L 145
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
until the power of attaining a simple human
relationship with the beneficiaries, that of
frank equality with them, is gone, and there
is left no mutual interest in a common
cause. To perform too many good deeds
may be to lose the power of recognizing good
in others; to be too absorbed in carrying
out a personal plan of improvement may
be to fail to catch the great moral lesson
which our times offer.
The president of this company fostered
his employees for many years; he gave
them sanitary houses and beautiful parks;
but in their extreme need, when they were
struggling with the most difficult situation
which the times could present to them, he
lost his touch and had nothing wherewith
to help them. The employer's conception
of goodness for his men had been cleanli-
ness, decency of living, and, above all,
thrift and temperance. Means had been
provided for all this, and opportunities had
also been given for recreation and improve-
ment. But this employer suddenly found
146
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
his town in the sweep of a world-wide moral
impulse. A movement had been going on
about him and among his working men, of
which he had been unconscious, or concern-
ing which he had heard only by rumor.
Outside the ken of philanthropists the
proletariat had learned to say in many lan-
guages, that " the injury of one is the
concern of all." Their watchwords were
brotherhood, sacrifice, the subordination of
individual and trade interests, to the good
of the working classes, and they were
moved by a determination to free that class
from the untoward conditions under which
they were laboring.
Compared to these watchwords, the old
ones which this philanthropic employer had
given his town were negative and inade-
quate. He had believed strongly in tem-
perance and steadiness of individual effort,
but had failed to apprehend the greater
movement of combined abstinence and
concerted action. With all his fostering,
the president had not attained to a con-
147
O.i^Lt
r.
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
ception of social morality for his men and
had imagined that virtue for them largely
meant absence of vice.
When the labor movement finally stirred
his town, or, to speak more fairly, when,
in their distress and perplexity, his own
employees appealed to an organized mani-
festation of this movement, they were quite
sure that simply because they were work-
men in distress they would not be deserted
by it. This loyalty on the part of a widely
ramified and well-organized union toward
the workmen in a " non-union shop," who
had contributed nothing to its cause, was
certainly a manifestation of moral power.
In none of his utterances or correspond-
ence did the president for an instant recog-
nize this touch of nobility, although one
would imagine that he would gladly point
out this bit of virtue, in what he must
have considered the moral ruin about
him. He stood throughout for the indi-
vidual virtues, those which had distinguished
the model workmen of his youth ; those
148
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
which had enabled him and so many of his
contemporaries to rise in life, when "rising jm>^
in life " was urged upon every promising boy ^i^ r^- ;
as the goal of his efforts. ^
Of the code of social ethics he had caught
absolutely nothing. The morals he had
advocated in selecting and training his men
did not fail them in the hour of confusion.
They were self-controlled, and they them-
selves destroyed no property. They were
sober and exhibited no drunkenness, even
although obliged to hold their meetings in
the saloon hall of a neighboring town.
They repaid their employer in kind, but
he had given them no rule for the life of
association into which they were plunged.
The president of the company desired that
his employees should possess the individual
and family virtues, but did nothing to >
cherish in them the social virtues which ^f<^Am^M
express themselves in associated effort. ^^;«^
Day after day, during that horrible time
of suspense, when the wires constantly
reported the same message, " the President
149
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
of the Company holds that there is nothing
to arbitrate," one was forced to feel that the
ideal of one-man rule was being sustained
in its baldest form. A demand from many
parts of the country and from many people
was being made for social adjustment,
against which the commercial training and
the individualistic point of view held its own
successfully.
The majority of the stockholders, not
only of this company but of similar com-
panies, and many other citizens, who had
had the same commercial experience, shared
and sustained this position. It was quite
impossible for them to catch the other point
of view. They not only felt themselves
right from the commercial standpoint, but
had gradually accustomed themselves also
to the philanthropic standpoint, until they
had come to consider their motives beyond
reproach, Habit held them persistent in
this view of the case through all changing
conditions.
A wise man has said that " the consent
150
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
of men and your own conscience are two
wings given you whereby you may rise to
God." It is so easy for the good and power-
ful to think that they can rise by following
the dictates of conscience, by pursuing their
own ideals, that they are prone to leave those
ideals unconnected with the consent of their
fellow-men. The president of the company
thought out within his own mind a beautiful
town. He had power with which to build
this town, but he did not appeal to nor obtain
the consent of the men who were living in it.
The most unambitious reform, recognizing
the necessity for this consent, makes for slow
but sane and strenuous progress, while the
most ambitious of social plans and experi-
ments, ignoring this, is prone to failure.
The man who insists upon consent, who
moves with the people, is bound to consult
the " feasible right " as well as the absolute
right. He is often obliged to attain only
Mr. Lincoln's " best possible," and then has
the sickening sense of compromise with his
best convictions. He has to move along
151
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
with those whom he leads toward a goal
that neither he nor they see very clearly till
they come to it. He has to discover what
people really want, and then "provide the
channels in which the growing moral force
of their lives shall flow." What he does
attain, however, is not the result of his
individual striving,' as a solitary mountain-
climber beyond that of the valley multitude
but it is sustained and upheld by the
sentiments and aspirations of many others.
Progress has been slower perpendicularly,
but incomparably greater because lateral.
He has not taught his contemporaries to
climb mountains, but he has persuaded the
villagers to move up a few feet higher ;
added to this, he has made secure his prog-
ress. A few months after the death of the
promoter of this model town, a court deci-
sion made it obligatory upon the company
to divest itself of the management of the
town as involving a function beyond its
corporate powers. The parks, flowers, and
fountains of this far-famed industrial centre
152
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
were dismantled, with scarcely a protest
from the inhabitants themselves.
The man who disassociates his ambition,
however disinterested, from the cooperation
of his fellows, always takes this risk of ulti-
mate failure. He does not take advantage
of the great conserver and guarantee of his
own permanent success which associated
efforts afford. Genuine experiments tow-
ard higher social conditions must have a
more democratic faith and practice than
those which underlie private venture. Pub-
lic parks and improvements, intended for
the common use, are after all only safe in
the hands of the public itself; and associ-
ated effort toward social progress, although
much more awkward and stumbling than
that same effort managed by a capable
individual, does yet enlist deeper forces
and evoke higher social capacities.
The successful business man who is also
the philanthropist is in more than the usual
danger of getting widely separated from
his employees. The nr^en already have the
153
j^Aa»i«^~_
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
American veneration for wealth and suc-
cessful business capacity, and, added to
this, they are dazzled by his good works.
The workmen have the same kindly im-
pulses as he, but while they organize their
charity into mutual benefit associations and
distribute their money in small amounts in
relief for the widows and insurance for the
injured, the employer may build model
towns, erect college buildings, which are
tangible and enduring, and thereby display
his goodness in concentrated form.
By the very exigencies of business de-
mands, the employer is too often cut off
from the social ethics developing in regard
to our larger social relationships, and from
the great moral life springing from our
common experiences. This is sure to
happen when he is good " to " people
rather than " with " them, when he allows
himself to decide what is best for them in-
stead of consulting them. He thus misses
the rectifying influence of that fellowship
which is so big that it leaves no room for
154
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
sensitiveness or gratitude. Without this
fellowship we may never know how great
the divergence between ourselves and others
may become, nor how cruel the misunder-
standings.
During a recent strike of the employees of
a large factory in Ohio, the president of the
company expressed himself as bitterly disap-
pointed by the results of his many kindnesses,
and evidently considered the employees
utterly unappreciative. His state of mind
was the result of the fallacy of ministering to
social needs from an individual impulse and
expecting a socialized return of gratitude
and loyalty. If the lunch-room was neces-
sary, it was a necessity in order that the em-
ployees might have better food, and, when
they had received the better food, the legiti-
mate aim of the lunch-room was met. If
baths were desirable, and the fifteen minutes
of calisthenic exercise given the women in
the middle of each half day brought a needed
rest and change to their muscles, then the
increased cleanHness and the increased bodily
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
comfort of so many people should of them-
selves have justified the experiment.
To demand, as a further result, that there
should be no strikes in the factoiy, no revolt
against the will of the employer because the
employees were filled with loyalty as the
result of the kindness, was of course to take
the experiment from an individual basis to
a social one.
Large mining companies and manufactur-
ing concerns are constantly appealing to
their stockholders for funds, or for permis-
sion to take a percentage of the profits, in
order that the money may be used for educa-
tional and social schemes designed for the
benefit of the employees. The promoters
of these schemes use as an argument and as
an appeal, that better relations will be thus
established, that strikes will be prevented, and
that in the end the money returned to the
stockholders will be increased. However
praiseworthy this appeal may be in motive, it
involves a distinct confusion of issues, and
in theory deserves the failure it so often
156
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
meets with in practice. In the clash which
follows a strike, the employees are accused
of an ingratitude, when there was no legiti-
mate reason to expect gratitude ; and useless
bitterness, which has really a factitious basis,
may be developed on both sides.
Indeed, unless the relation becomes a demo-
cratic one, the chances of misunderstanding
are increased, when to the relation of em-
ployer and employees is added the relation of
benefactor to beneficiaries, in so far as there
is still another opportunity for acting upon
the individual code of ethics.
There is no doubt that these efforts are to
be commended, not only from the standpoint
of their social value but because they have a
marked industrial significance. Failing, as
they do, however, to touch the question of
v/ages and hours, which are almost invariably
the points of trades-union effort, the employ-
ers confuse the mind of the public when
they urge the amelioration of conditions and
the kindly relation existing between them
and their men as a reason for the discontinu-
es?
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
ance of strikes and other trades-union tactics.
The men have individually accepted the
kindness of the employers as it was indi-
vidually offered, but quite as the latter urges
his inability to increase wages unless he
has the cooperation of his competitors, so
the men state that they are bound to the
trades-union struggle for an increase in
wages because it can only be undertaken by
combinations of labor.
Even the much more democratic effort to
divide a proportion of the profits at the end
of the year among the employees, upon the
basis of their wages and efficiency, is also
exposed to a weakness, from the fact that the
employing side has the power of determin-
ing to whom the benefit shall accrue.
Both individual acts of self-defence on the
part of the wage earner and individual acts
of benevolence on the part of the employer
are most useful as they establish standards
to which the average worker and employer
may in time be legally compelled to conform.
Progress must always come through the in-
158
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
dividual who varies from the type and has
sufficient energy to express this variation.
He first holds a higher conception than that
held by the mass of his fellows of what is
righteous under given conditions, and ex-
presses this conviction in conduct, in many
instances formulating a certain scruple which
the others share, but have not yet defined
even to themselves. Progress, however, is
not secure until the mass has conformed to
this new righteousness. This is equally true
in regard to any advance made in the stand-
ard of living on the part of the trades-
unionists or in the improved conditions of
industry on the part of reforming employers.
The mistake lies, not in overpraising the
advance thus inaugurated by individual ini-
tiative, but in regarding the achievement as
complete in a social sense when it is still
in the realm of individual action.
No sane manufacturer regards his factory
as the centre of the industrial system. He
knows very well that the cost of material,
wages, and selling prices are determined by
159
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
industrial conditions completely beyond his
control. Yet the same man may quite
calmly regard himself and his own private
principles as merely self -regarding, and ex-
pect results from casual philanthropy which
can only be accomplished through those
common rules of life and labor estab-
lished by the community for the common
good.
Outside of and surrounding these smaller
and most significant efforts are the larger
and irresistible movements operating toward
combination. This movement must tend to
decide upon social matters from the social
standpoint. Until then it is difficult to keep
our minds free from a confusion of issues.
Such a confusion occurs when the gift of a
large sum to the community for a public
and philanthropic purpose, throws a certain
glamour over all the earlier acts of a man,
and makes it difficult for the community to
see possible wrongs committed against it, in
the accumulation of wealth so beneficently
used. It is possible also that the resolve to
1 60
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
be thus generous unconsciously influences
the man himself in his methods of accumu-
lation. He keeps to a certain individual
rectitude, meaning to make an individual
restitution by the old paths of generosity
and kindness, whereas if he had in view
social restitution on the newer lines of
justice and opportunity, he would through-
out his course doubtless be watchful of
his industrial relationships and his social
virtues.
The danger of professionally attaining to
the power of the righteous man, of yielding
to the ambition " for doing good " on a large
scale, compared to which the ambition for
politics, learning, or wealth, are vulgar and
commonplace, ramifies through our modern
life; and those most easily beset by this
temptation are precisely the men best situ-
ated to experiment on the larger social lines,
because they so easily dramatize their acts
and lead public opinion. Very often, too,
they have in their hands the preservation
and advancement of large vested interests,
M l6l
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and often see clearly and truly that they
are better able to administer the affairs of
the community than the community itself:
sometimes they see that if they do not ad-
minister them sharply and quickly, as only
an individual can, certain interests of theirs
dependent upon the community will go to
ruin.
The model employer first considered, pro-
vided a large sum in his will with which
to build and equip a polytechnic school,
which will doubtless be of great public
value. This again shows the advantage of
individual management, in the spending as
well as in the accumulating of wealth, but
this school will attain its highest good, in so
far as it incites the ambition to provide other
schools from public funds. The town of
Zurich possesses a magnificent polytechnic
institute, secured by the vote of the entire
people and supported from public taxes.
Every man who voted for it is interested that
his child should enjoy its benefits, and, of
course, the voluntary attendance must be
162
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
larger than in a school accepted as a gift
to the community.
In the educational efforts of model em-
ployers, as in other attempts toward social
amelioration, one man with the best of inten-
tions is trying to do what the entire body
of employees should have undertaken to
do for themselves. The result of his efforts
will only attain its highest value as it serves
as an incentive to procure other results by
the community as well as for the commu-
nity.
There are doubtless many things which
the public would never demand unless they
were first supplied by individual initiative,
both because the public lacks the imagi-
nation, and also the power of formulating
their wants. Thus philanthropic effort sup-
plies kindergartens, until they become so
established in the popular affections that
they are incorporated in the public school
system. Churches and missions establish
reading rooms, until at last the public
library system dots the city with branch
163
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
reading rooms and libraries. For this will-
ingness to take risks for the sake of an
ideal, for those experiments which must be
undertaken with vigor and boldness in order
to secure didactic value in failure as well as
in success, society must depend upon the
individual possessed with money, and also
distinguished by earnest and unselfish pur-
pose. Such experiments enable the nation
to use the Referendum method in its public
affairs. Each social experiment is thus
tested by a few people, given wide pub-
licity, that it may be observed and discussed
by the bulk of the citizens before the public
prudently makes up its mind whether or not
it is wise to incorporate it into the functions
of government. If the decision is in its
favor and it is so incorporated, it can then
be carried on with confidence and enthu-
siasm.
But experience has shown that we can
only depend upon successful men for a cer-
tain type of experiment in the line of indus-
trial amelioration and social advancement.
164
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
The list of those who found churches, edu-
cational institutions, libraries, and art galler-
ies, is very long, as is again the list of those
contributing to model dwellings, recreation
halls, and athletic fields. At the present
moment factory employers are doing much
to promote " industrial betterment " in the
way of sanitary surroundings, opportunities
for bathing, lunch rooms provided with
cheap and wholesome food, club rooms, and
guild halls. But there is a line of social
experiment involving social righteousness in
its most advanced form, in which the num-
ber of employers and the " favored class "
are so few that it is plain society cannot
count upon them for continuous and valu-
able help. This lack is in the line of factory uf
legislation and that sort of social advance
implied in shorter hours and the regulation
of wages ; in short, all that organization and
activity that is involved in such a mainten-
ance and increase of wages as would prevent
the lowering of the standard of life.
A large body of people feel keenly that
165
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
the present industrial system is in a state of
profound disorder, and that there is no guar-
antee that the pursuit of individual ethics
will ever right it. They claim that relief
can only come through deliberate corporate
effort inspired by social ideas and guided by
the study of economic laws, and that the
present industrial system thwarts our ethi-
cal demands, not only for social righteous-
ness but for social order. Because they
believe that each advance in ethics must
be made fast by a corresponding advance
in politics and legal enactment, they insist
upon the right of state regulation and con-
trol. While many people representing all
classes in a community would assent to
this as to a general proposition, and would
even admit it as a certain moral obligation,
legislative enactments designed to control in-
dustrial conditions have largely been secured
through the efforts of a few citizens, mostly
those who constantly see the harsh conditions
of labor and who are incited to activity by
their sympathies as well as their convictions.
i66
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
This may be illustrated by the series of
legal enactments regulating the occupations
in which children may be allowed to work,
also the laws in regard to the hours of labor
permitted in those occupations, and the mini-
mum age below which children may not be
employed. The first child labor laws were
enacted in England through the efforts of
those members of parliament whose hearts
were wrung by the condition of the little
parish apprentices bound out to the early
textile manufacturers of the north ; and
through the long years required to build up
the code of child labor legislation which
England now possesses, knowledge of the
conditions has always preceded effective leg-
islation. The efforts of that small number
in every community who believe in legisla-
tive control have always been reenforced by
the efforts of trades-unionists rather than by
the efforts of employers. Partly because the
employment of workingmen in the factories
brings them in contact with the children
who tend to lower wages and demoralize
167
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
their trades, and partly because working-
men have no money nor time to spend in
alleviating philanthropy, and must perforce
seize upon agitation and legal enactment as
the only channel of redress which is open
to them.
We may illustrate by imagining a row
of people seated in a moving street-car,
into which darts a boy of eight, calling out
the details of the last murder, in the hope
of selling an evening newspaper. A com-
fortable looking man buys a paper from
him with no sense of moral shock; he may
even be a trifle complacent that he has
helped along the little fellow, who is making
his way in the world. The philanthropic
lady sitting next to him may perhaps reflect
that it is a pity that such a bright boy is
not in school. She may make up her mind
in a moment of compunction to redouble
her efforts for various newsboys' schools
and homes, that this poor child may have
better teaching, and perhaps a chance at
manual training. She probably is con-
i68
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
vinced that he alone, by his unaided efforts,
is supporting a widowed mother, and her
heart is moved to do all she can for him.
Next to her sits a workingman trained
in trades-union methods. He knows that
the boy's natural development is arrested,
and that the abnormal activity of his body
and mind uses up the force which should
go into growth ; moreover, that this prema-
ture use of his powers has but a momentary
and specious value. He is forced to these
conclusions because he has seen many a
man, entering the factory at eighteen and
twenty, so worn out by premature work
that he was " laid on the shelf " within ten
or fifteen years. He knows very well that
he can do nothing in the way of ameliorat-
ing the lot of this particular boy; that his
only possible chance is to agitate for proper
child-labor laws ; to regulate, and if possible
prohibit, street-vending by children, in order
that the child of the poorest may have his
school time secured to him, and may have
at least his short chance for growth.
169
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
These three people, sitting in the street
car, are all honest and upright, and recog-
nize a certain duty toward the forlorn chil-
dren of the community. The self-made man
is encouraging one boy's own efforts; the
philanthropic lady is helping on a few boys ;
the workingman alone is obliged to include
all the boys of his class. Workingmen, be-
cause of their feebleness in all but numbers,
have been forced to appeal to the state, in
order to secure protection for themselves
and for their children. They cannot all
rise out of their class, as the occasionally
successful man has done ; some of them
must be left to do the work in the facto-
ries and mines, and they have no money
to spend in philanthropy.
Both public agitation and a social appeal
to the conscience of the community is neces-
sary in order to secure help from the state,
and, curiously enough, child-labor laws^once
enacted and enforced are a matter of great
pride, and even come to be regarded as a
register of the community's humanity and
170
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
enlightenment. If the method of public agi-
tation could find quiet and orderly expression
in legislative enactment, and if labor measures
could be submitted to the examination and
judgment of the whole without a sense of
division or of warfare, we should have the
ideal development of the democratic state.
But we judge labor organizations as we
do other living institutions, not by their
declaration of principles, which we seldom
read, but by their blundering efforts to
apply their principles to actual conditions,
and by the oft-time failure of their repre-
sentatives, when the individual finds himself
too weak to become the organ of corporate
action.
The very blunders and lack of organization
too often characterizing a union, in marked
contrast to the orderly management of a
factory, often confuse us as to the real
issues involved, and we find it hard to
trust uncouth and unruly manifestations
of social effort. The situation is made
even more complicated by the fact that
171
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL. ETHICS
those who are formulating a code of asso-
ciated action so often break through the
established code of law and order. As
society has a right to demand of the re-
forming individual that he be sternly held
to his personal and domestic claims, so it
has a right to insist that labor organiza-
tions shall keep to the hardly won standards
of public law and order ; and the community
performs but its plain duty when it registers
its protest every time law and order are
subverted, even in the interest of the so-
called social effort. Yet in moments of
industrial stress and strain the community
is confronted by a moral perplexity which
may arise from the mere fact that the good
of yesterday is opposed to the good of to-
day, and that which may appear as a choice
between virtue and vice is really but a choice
between virtue and virtue. In the disorder
and confusion sometimes incident to growth
and progress, the community may be unable
to see anything but the unlovely struggle
itself.
172
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
The writer recalls a conversation between
two workingmen who were leaving a lecture
on " Organic Evolution." The first was
much puzzled, and anxiously inquired of
the second " if evolution could mean that
one animal turned into another." The chal-
lenged workman stopped in the rear of the
hall, put his foot upon a chair, and ex-
pounded what he thought evolution did
mean ; and this, so nearly as the conversa-
tion can be recalled, is what he said : " You
see a lot of fishes are living in a stream,
which overflows in the spring and strands
some of them upon the bank. The weak
ones die up there, but others make a big
effort to get back into the water. They
dig their fins into the sand, breathe as
much air as they can with their gills, and
have a terrible time. But after a while
their fins turn into legs and their gills into
lungs, and they have become frogs. Of
course they are further along than the
sleek, comfortable fishes who sail up and
down the stream waving their tails and
173
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
despising the poor damaged things thrash-
ing around on the bank. He — the lec-
turer— did not say anything about men,
but it is easy enough to think of us poor
devils on the dry bank, struggling without
enough to live on, while the comfortable
fellows sail along in the water with all
they want and despise us because we thrash
about." His listener did not reply, and was
evidently dissatisfied both with the explana-
tion and the application. Doubtless the illus-
tration was bungling in more than its setting
forth, but the story is suggestive.
At times of social disturbance the law-
abiding citizen is naturally so anxious for
peace and order, his sympathies are so
justly and inevitably on the side making
for the restoration of law, that it is diffi-
cult for him to see the situation fairly.
He becomes insensible to the unselfish
impulse which may prompt a sympathetic
strike in behalf of the workers in a non-
union shop, because he allows his mind to
dwell exclusively on the disorder which has
174
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
become associated with the strike. He is
completely side-tracked by the ugly phases
of a great moral movement. It is always
a temptation to assume that the side which
has respectability, authority, and superior
intelligence, has therefore righteousness as
well, especially when the same side presents
concrete results of individual effort as over
against the less tangible results of associated
effort.
It is as yet most difficult for us to free
ourselves from the individualistic point of
view sufficiently to group events in their
social relations and to judge fairly those
who are endeavoring to produce a social
result through all the difficulties of associ-
ated action. The philanthropist still finds ^
his path much easier than do those who are
attempting a social morality. In the first
place, the public, anxious to praise what it
recognizes as an undoubted moral effort
often attended with real personal sacrifice,
joyfully seizes upon this manifestation and
overpraises it, recognizing the philanthropist
175
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
as an old friend in the paths of righteous-
ness, whereas the others are strangers and
possibly to be distrusted as aliens. It is
easy to confuse the response to an abnormal
number of individual claims with the re-
sponse to the social claim. An exaggerated
personal morality is often mistaken for a
social morality, and until it attempts to min-
ister to a social situation its total inadequacy
is not discovered. To attempt to attain a
social morality without a basis of democratic
experience results in the loss of the only
possible corrective and guide, and ends in
an exaggerated individual morality but not
in social morality at all. We see this from
time to time in the care-worn and over-
worked philanthropist, who has taxed his
individual will beyond the normal limits and
has lost his clew to the situation among a
bewildering number of cases. A man who
takes the betterment of humanity for his
aim and end must also take the daily ex-
periences of humanity for the constant cor-
rection of his process. He must not only
176
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
test and guide his achievement by human
experience, but he must succeed or fail in
proportion as he has incorporated that ex-
perience with his own. Otherwise his own
achievements become his stumbling-block,
and he comes to believe in his own good-
ness as something outside of himself. He
makes an exception of himself, and thinks
that he is different from the rank and file of
his fellows. He forgets that it is necessary
to know of the lives of our contemporaries,
not only in order to believe in their integrity,
which is after all but the first beginnings
of social morality, but in order to attain to
any mental or moral integrity for ourselves
or any such hope for society.
H 177
CHAPTER VI
Educational Methods
As democracy modifies our conception of
life, it constantly raises the value and func-
tion of each member of the community, how-
ever humble he may be. We have come to
believe that the most " brutish man " has
a value in our common life, a function to
perform which can be fulfilled by no one
else. We are gradually requiring of the
educator that he shall free the powers of
each man and connect him with the rest of
life. We ask this not merely because it is
the man's right to be thus connected, but
because we have become convinced that the
social order cannot afford to get along with-
out his special contribution. Just as we
have come to resent all hindrances which
keep us from untrammelled comradeship with
178
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
our fellows, and as we throw down unnatural
divisions, not in the spirit of the eighteenth-
century reformers, but in the spirit of those
to whom social equality has become a neces-
sity for further social development, so we
are impatient to use the dynamic power
residing in the mass of men, and demand
that the educator free that power. We
believe that man's moral idealism is the
constructive force of progress, as it has
always been ; but because every human being
is a creative agent and a possible generator
of fine enthusiasm, we are sceptical of the
moral idealism of the few and demand the
education of the many, that there may be
greater freedom, strength, and subtilty of
intercourse and hence an increase of dy-
namic power. We are not content to include
all men in our hopes, but have become
conscious that all men are hoping and are
part of the same movement of which we are
a part.
Many people impelled by these ideas have
become impatient with the slow recognition
179
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
on the part of the educators of their mani-
fest obligation to prepare and nourish the
child and the citizen for social relations.
The educators should certainly conserve the
learning and training necessary for the suc-
cessful individual and family life, but should
/ add to that a preparation for the enlarged
^ social efforts which our increasing democ-
racy requires. The democratic ideal de-
mands of the school that it shall give the
child's own experience a social value ; that
it shall teach him to direct his own activi-
ties and adjust them to those of other
people. We are not willing that thousands
of industrial workers shall put all of their
activity and toil into services from which
the community as a whole reaps the benefit,
while their mental conceptions and code of
morals are narrow and untouched by any
uplift which the consciousness of social
value might give them.
We are impatient with the schools which
lay all stress on reading and writing, sus-
pecting them to rest upon the assumption
i8o
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
that the ordinary experience of life is worth
little, and that all knowledge and interest
must be brought to the children through the
medium of books. Such an assumption
fails to give the child any clew to the life
about him, or any power to usefully or in-
telligently connect himself with it. This
may be illustrated by observations made in
a large Italian colony situated in Chicago,
the children from which are, for the most
part, sent to the public schools.
The members of the Italian colony are
largely from South Italy, — Calabrian and
Sicilian peasants, or Neapolitans from the
workingmen's quarters of that city. They
have come to America with the distinct aim
of earning money, and finding more room
for the energies of themselves and their
children. In almost all cases they mean
to go back again, simply because their
imaginations cannot picture a continuous
life away from the old surroundings. Their
experiences in Italy have been those of simple
outdoor activity, and their ideas have come
i8i
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
directly to them from their struggle with
Nature, — such a hand-to-hand struggle as
takes place when each man gets his living
largely through his own cultivation of the soil,
or with tools simply fashioned by his own
hands. The women, as in all primitive life,
have had more diversified activities than
the men. They have cooked, spun, and
knitted, in addition to their almost equal
work in the fields. Very few of the peasant
men or women can either read or write.
They are devoted to their children, strong
in their family feeling, even to remote rela-
tionships, and clannish in their community
life.
The entire family has been upheaved, and
is striving to adjust itself to its new sur-
roundings. The men, for the most part,
work on railroad extensions through the
summer, under the direction of a padrone^
who finds the work for them, regulates the
amount of their wages, and supplies them
with food. The first effect of immigration
upon the women is that of idleness. They no
182
EDUCA xONAL METHODS
longer work in the fields, nor milk the goats,
nor pick up faggots. The mother of the
family buys all the clothing, not only already
spun and woven but made up into garments,
of a cut and fashion beyond her powers. It
is, indeed, the most economical thing for
her to do. Her house-cleaning and cook-
ing are of the simplest ; the bread is usually
baked outside of the house, and the maca-
roni bought prepared for boiling. All of
those outdoor and domestic activities, which
she would naturally have handed on to her
daughters, have slipped away from her. The
domestic arts are gone, with their absorb-
ing interests for the children, their educa-
tional value, and incentive to activity. A
household in a tenement receives almost
no raw material. For the hundreds of chil-
dren who have never seen wheat 2frow,
there are dozens who have never seen bread
baked. The occasional washings and scrub-
bings are associated only with discomfort.
The child of such a family receives constant
stimulus of most exciting sort from his city
183
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
street life, but he has little or no oppor-
tunity to use his energies in domestic
manufacture, or, indeed, constructively in
any direction. No activity is supplied to
le
A
n
sen ..^..^ ,»xni uiucii
significance to all the others. The family
has no social life in any structural form
and can supply none to the child. He
ought to get it in the school and give it
to his family, the school thus becoming
the connector with the organized society
184
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
about them. It is the children aged six,
eight, and ten, who go to school, entering,
of course, the primary grades. If a boy is
twelve or thirteen on his arrival in Amer-
ica, his parents see in him a wage-earning
factor, and the girl of the same age is al-
ready looking toward her marriage.
Let us take one of these boys, who has
learned in his six or eight years to speak
his native language, and to feel himself
strongly identified with the fortunes of his
family. Whatever interest has come to the
minds of his ancestors has come through
the use of their hands in the open air ; and
open air and activity of body have been the
inevitable accompaniments of all their expe-
riences. Yet the first thing that the boy
must do when he reaches school is to sit
still, at least part of the time, and he must
learn to listen to what is said to him, with
all the perplexity of listening to a foreign
tongue. He does not find this very stimu-
lating, and is slow to respond to the more
subtle incentives of the schoolroom. The
185
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
peasant child is perfectly indifferent to show-
ing off and making a good recitation. He
leaves all that to his schoolfellows, who are
more sophisticated and equipped with better
English. His parents are not deeply inter-
ested in keeping him in school, and will
not hold him there against his inclination.
Their experience does not point to the
good ^ '•■•-- 4-v,of it is the
«i?./^ [mil
c*^ «.
we admit that in education it is neces-
to begin with the experiences which
i86
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
the child already has and to use his sponta-
neous and social activity, then the city
streets begin this education for him in a
more natural way than does the school.
The South Italian peasant comes from a
life of picking olives and oranges, and he
easily sends his children out to pick up coal
from railroad tracks, or wood from buildings
which have been burned down. Unfortu-
nately, this process leads by easy transition
to petty thieving. It is easy to go from the
coal on the railroad track to the coal and
wood which stand before a dealer's shop;
from the potatoes which have rolled from
a rumbling wagon to the vegetables dis-
played by the grocer. This is apt to be
the record of the boy who responds con-
stantly to the stimulus and temptations of
the street, although in the beginning his
search for bits of food and fuel was prompted
by the best of motives.
The school has to compete with a great
deal from the outside in addition to the
distractions of the neighborhood. Nothing
187
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
is more fascinating than that mysterious
"down town," whither the boy longs to go
to sell papers and black boots, to attend
theatres, and, if possible, to stay all night
on the pretence of waiting for the early
edition of the great dailies. If a boy is once
thoroughly caught in these excitements, noth-
ing can save him from over-stimulation and
consequent debility and worthlessness ; he
arrives at maturity with no habits of regular
work and with a distaste for its dulness.
On the other hand, there are hundreds
* • • • •
of boys of various nationalities who con-
scientiously remain in school and fulfil all
the requirements of the early grades, and
at the age of fourteen are found in fac-
tories, painstakingly performing their work
year after year. These later are the men
who form the mass of the population
in every industrial neighborhood of every
large city ; but they carry on the industrial
processes year after year without in the least
knowing what it is all about. The one
fixed habit which the boy carries away with
i88
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
him from the school to the factory is the
feeling that his work is merely provisional.
In school the next grade was continually
held before him as an object of attainment,
and it resulted in the conviction that the
sole object of present effort is to get ready
for something else. This tentative attitude
takes the last bit of social stimulus out of his
factory work ; he pursues it merely as a ne-
cessity, and his very mental attitude destroys
his chance for a realization of its social
value. As the boy in school contracted
the habit of doing his work in certa'in hours
and taking his pleasure in certain other
hours, so in the factory he earns his money
by ten hours of dull work and spends it in
three hours of lurid and unprofitable pleas-
ure in the evening. Both in the school
and in the factory, in proportion as his work
grows dull and monotonous, his recreation
must become more exciting and stimulating.
The hopelessness of adding evening classes
and social entertainments as a mere frill to
a day filled with monotonous and deadening
189
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
drudgery constantly becomes more apparent
to those who are endeavoring to bring a
fuller life to the industrial members of the
community, and who are looking forward
to a time when work shall cease to be
senseless drudgery with no self-expression
on the part of the worker. It sometimes
seems that the public schools should con-
tribute much more than they do to the
consummation of this time. If the army
of school children who enter the factories
every year possessed thoroughly vitalized
faculties, they might do much to lighten
this incubus of dull factory work which
presses so heavily upon so large a number
of our fellow-citizens. Has our commercial-
ism been so strong that our schools have
become insensibly commercialized, whereas
we supposed that our industrial life was
receiving the broadening and illuminating
effects of the schools? The training of
these children, so far as it has been voca-
tional at all, has been in the direction of
clerical work. It is possible that the busi-
190
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
ness men, whom we in America so tremen-
dously admire, have really been dictating the
curriculum of our public schools, in spite
of the conventions of educators and the
suggestions of university professors. The
business man, of course, has not said, " I
will have the public schools train ofhce boys
and clerks so that I may have them easily
and cheaply," but he has sometimes said,
" Teach the children to write legibly and
to figure accurately and quickly ; to acquire
habits of punctuality and order; to be
prompt to obey; and you will fit them to
make their way in the world as I have made
mine." Has the workingman been silent
as to what he desires for his children, and
allowed the business man to decide for him
there, as he has allowed the politician to
manage his municipal affairs, or has the
workingman so far shared our universal
optimism that he has really believed that
his children would never need to go into
industrial life at all, but that all of his sons
would become bankers and merchants ?
191
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
Certain it is that no sufficient study has
been made of the child who enters into in-
dustrial life early and stays there perma-
nently, to give him some offset to its
monotony and dulness, some historic signifi-
cance of the part he is taking in the life of
the community.
It is at last on behalf of the average work-
ingmen that our increasing democracy im-
pels us to make a new demand upon the
educator. As the political expression of
democracy has claimed for the workingman
the free right of citizenship, so a code of
social ethics is now insisting that he shall be
a conscious member of society, having some
notion of his social and industrial value.
The early ideal of a city that it was a
market-place in which to exchange produce,
and a mere trading-post for merchants, appar-
ently still survives in our minds and is con-
stantly reflected in our schools. We have
either failed to realize that cities have be-
come great centres of production and ifian-
ufacture in which a huge population is
192
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
engaged, or we have lacked sufficient pres-
ence of mind to adjust ourselves to the
change. We admire much more the men
who accumulate riches, and who gather to
themselves the results of industry, than the
men who actually carry forward industrial
processes ; and, as has been pointed out, our
schools still prepare children almost exclu-
sively for commercial and professional life.
Quite as the country boy dreams of leav-
ing the farm for life in town and begins early
to imitate the travelling salesman in dress
and manner, so the school boy within the
town hopes to be an office boy, and later a
clerk or salesman, and looks upon work in
the factory as the occupation of ignorant and
unsuccessful men. The schools do so little
really to interest the child in the life of pro-
duction, or to excite his ambition in the line
of industrial occupation, that the ideal of life,
almost from the very beginning, becomes not
an absorbing interest in one's work and a
consciousness of its value and social rela-
tion, but a desire for money with which un-
o 193
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
meaning purchases may be made and an
unmeaning social standing obtained.
The son of a workingman who is success-
ful in commercial life, impresses his family
and neighbors quite as does the prominent
city man when he comes back to dazzle his
native town. The children of the working
people learn many useful things in the pub-
lic schools, but the commercial arithmetic,
and many other studies, are founded on
the tacit assumption that a boy rises in life
by getting away from manual labor, — that
every promising boy goes into business or a
profession. The children destined for fac-
tory life are furnished with what would be
most useful under other conditions, quite as
the prosperous farmer's wife buys a folding-
bed for her huge four-cornered " spare room,"
because her sister, who has married a city
man, is obliged to have a folding-bed in the
cramped limits of her flat. Partly because
so little is done for him educationally, and
partly because he must live narrowly and
dress meanly, the life of the average laborer
194
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
tends to become flat and monotonous, with
nothing in his work to feed his mind or hold
his interest. Theoretically, we would all
admit that the man at the bottom, who per-
forms the meanest and humblest work, so
long as the work is necessary, performs a
useful function; but we do not live up to our
theories, and in addition to his hard and un-
interesting work he is covered with a sort
of contempt, and unless he falls into illness
or trouble, he receives little sympathy or
attention. Certainly no serious effort is
made to give him a participation in the
social and industrial life with which he
comes in contact, nor any insight and in-
spiration regarding it.
Apparently we have not yet recovered
manual labor from the deep distrust which
centuries of slavery and the feudal system
have cast upon it. To get away from menial
work, to do obviously little with one's hands,
is still the desirable status. This may
readily be seen all along the line. A work-
ingman's family will make every effort and
195
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
sacrifice that the brightest daughter be sent
to the high school and through the normal
school, quite as much because a teacher in
the family raises the general social standing
and sense of family consequence, as that the
returns are superior to factory or even office
work. " Teacher " in the vocabulary of many
children is a synonym for women-folk gentry,
and the name is indiscriminately applied to
women of certain dress and manner. The
same desire for social advancement is ex-
pressed by the purchasing of a piano, or the
fact that the son is an office boy, and not a
factory hand. The overcrowding of the pro-
fessions by poorly equipped men arises from
much the same source, and from the convic-
tion that, " an education " is wasted if a boy
goes into a factory or shop.
A Chicago manufacturer tells a story of
twin boys, whom he befriended and meant
to give a start in life. He sent them both
to the Athenaeum for several winters as a
preparatory business training, and then took
them into his office, where they speedily
196
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
became known as the bright one and the
stupid one. The stupid one was finally
dismissed after repeated trials, when to the
surprise of the entire establishment, he
quickly betook himself into the shops,
where he became a wide-awake and valu-
able workman. His chagrined benefactor,
in telling the story, admits that he him-
self had fallen a victim to his own busi-
ness training and his early notion of
rising in life. In reality he had merely
followed the lead of most benevolent
people who help poor boys. They test
the success of their efforts by the number
whom they have taken out of factory work
into some other and "higher occupation."
Quite in line with this commercial ideal
are the night schools and institutions of
learning most accessible to working people.
First among them is the business college
which teaches largely the mechanism of
type-writing and book-keeping, and lays
all stress upon commerce and methods of
distribution. Commodities are treated as
197
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
exports and imports, or solely in regard to
their commercial value, and not, of course,
in relation to their historic development
or the manufacturing processes to which
they have been subjected. These schools
do not in the least minister to the needs
of the actual factory employee, who is in the
shop and not in the office. We assume
that all men are searching for "puddings
and power," to use Carlyle's phrase, and
furnish only the schools which help them
to those ends.
The business college man, or even the
man who goes through an academic course
in order to prepare for a profession, comes
to look on learning too much as an invest-
ment from which he will later reap the
benefits in earning money. He does not
connect learning with industrial pursuits,
nor does he in the least lighten or illumi-
nate those pursuits for those of his friends
who have not risen in life. " It is as
though nets were laid at the entrance to
education, in which those who by some
198
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
means or other escape from the masses
bowed down by labor, are inevitably caught
and held from substantial service to their
fellov^
acces:
sity I
ment!
concc
from
come
be ac
and '
ment;
excep
atten(
year
of inert Knowieage wnicn notnrng m tneir
experience fuses into availability or realiza-
tion.
Among the many disappointments which
the settlement experiment has brought to
its promoters, perhaps none is keener than
the fact that they have as yet failed to
work out methods of education, specialized
199
k/idmnk.]
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and adapted to the needs of adult working
people in contra-distinction to those em-
ployed in schools and colleges, or those
used in teaching children. There are
many excellent reasons and explanations
for this failure. In the first place, the
residents themselves are for the most part
imbued with academic methods and ideals,
which it is most difficult to modify. To
quote from a late settlement report, " The
most vaunted educational work in settle-
ments amounts often to the stimulation
mentally of a select few who are, in a
sense, of the academic type of mind, and
who easily and quickly respond to the
academic methods employed." These classes
may be valuable, but they leave quite
untouched the great mass of the factory
population, the ordinary workingman of
the ordinary workingman's street, whose
attitude is best described as that of "ac-
quiescence," who lives through the aim-
less passage of the years without incentive
"to imagine, to design, or to aspire."
200
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
These men are totally untouched by all the
educational and philanthropic machinery
which is designed for the young and the
helpless who live on the same streets with
them. They do not often drink to excess,
they regularly give all their wages to their
wives, they have a vague pride in their supe-
rior children ; but they grow prematurely old
and stiff in all their muscles, and become
more and more taciturn, their entire energies
consumed in "holding a job."
Various attempts have been made to
break through the inadequate educational
facilities supplied by commercialism and
scholarship, both of which have followed
their own ideals and have failed to look at
the situation as it actually presents itself.
The most noteworthy attempt has been the
movement toward industrial education, the
agitation for which has been ably seconded
by manufacturers of a practical type, who
have from time to time founded and en-
dowed technical schools, designed for work-
ingmen's sons. The early schools of this
20I
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
type inevitably reflected the ideal of the
self-made man. They succeeded in trans-
ferring a few skilled workers into the upper
class of trained engineers, and a few less
skilled workers into the class of trained
mechanics, but did not aim to educate the
many who are doomed to the unskilled work
which the permanent specialization of the
division of labor demands.
The Peter Coopers and other good men
honestly believed that if intelligence could
be added to industry, each workingman
who faithfully attended these schools could
walk into increased skill and wages, and in
time even become an employer himself.
Such schools are useful beyond doubt; but
so far as educating workingmen is con-
cerned or in any measure satisfying the
democratic ideal, they plainly beg the
question.
Almost every large city has two or three
polytechnic institutions founded by rich
men, anxious to help "poor boys." These
have been captured by conventional edu-
202
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
cators for the purpose of fitting young men
for the colleges and universities. They have
compromised by merely adding to the usual
academic course manual work, applied mathe-
matics, mechanical drawing and engineering.
Two schools in Chicago, plainly founded for
the sons of workingmen, afford an illustration
of this tendency and result. On the other
hand, so far as schools of this type have
been captured by commercialism, they turn
out trained engineers, professional chemists,
and electricians. They are polytechnics of
a high order, but do not even pretend to
admit the workingman with his meagre
intellectual equipment. They graduate ma-
chine builders, but not educated machine
tenders. Even the textile schools are
largely seized by young men who expect to
be superintendents of factories, designers,
or manufacturers themselves, and the textile
worker who actually " holds the thread " is
seldom seen in them ; indeed, in one of the
largest schools women are not allowed, in spite
of the fact that spinning and weaving have
203
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
traditionally been woman's work, and that
thousands of women are at present employed
in the textile mills.
It is much easier to go over the old
paths of education with " manual training "
thrown in, as it were; it is much simpler
to appeal to the old ambitions of "getting
on in life," or of " preparing for a profes-
sion," or " for a commercial career," than to
work out new methods on democratic lines.
These schools gradually drop back into the
conventional courses, modified in some slight
degree, while the adaptation to working-
men's needs is never made, nor, indeed,
vigorously attempted. In the meantime,
the manufacturers continually protest that
engineers, especially trained for devising
machines, are not satisfactory. Three gen-
erations of workers have invented, but we
are told that invention no longer goes on
in the workshop, even when it is artificially
stimulated by the offer of prizes, and that
the inventions of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century have by no means ful-
204
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
filled the promise of the earlier three-
quarters.
Every foreman in a large factory has had
experience with two classes of men : first
with those who become rigid and tolerate no
change in their work, partly because they
make more money "working by the piece,"
when they stick to that work which they
have learned to do rapidly, and partly be-
cause the entire muscular and nervous sys-
tem has become by daily use adapted to
particular motions and resents change. Sec-
ondly, there are the men who float in and
out of the factory, in a constantly changing
stream. They " quit work " for the slightest
reason or none at all, and never become
skilled at anything. Some of them are men
of low intelligence, but many of them are
merely too nervous and restless, too impa-
tient, too easily " driven to drink," to be of
any use in a modern factory. They are the
men for whom the demanded adaptation is
impossible.
The individual from whom the industrial
205
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
order demands ever larger drafts of time
and energy, should be nourished and en-
riched from social sources, in proportion as
he is drained. He, more than other men,
needs the conception of historic continuity
in order to reveal to him the purpose and
utility of his work, and he can only be stimu-
lated and dignified as he obtains a con-
ception of his proper relation to society.
Scholarship is evidently unable to do this
for him; for, unfortunately, the same ten-
dency to division of labor has also produced
over-specialization in scholarship, with the
sad result that when the scholar attempts to
minister to a worker, he gives him the result
of more specialization rather than an offset
from it. He cannot bring healing and solace
because he himself is suffering from the same
disease. There is indeed a deplorable lack
of perception and adaptation on the part of
educators all along the line.
It will certainly be embarrassing to have
our age written down triumphant in the
matter of inventions, in that our factories
206
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
were filled with intricate machines, the result
of advancing mathematical and mechanical
knowledge in relation to manufacturing pro-
cesses, but defeated in that it lost its head
over the achievement and forgot the men.
The accusation would stand, that the age
failed to perform a like service in the ex-
tension of history and art to the factory
employees who ran the machines; that the
machine tenders, heavy and almost dehuman-
ized by monotonous toil, walked about in
the same streets with us, and sat in the same
cars ; but that we were absolutely indifferent
and made no genuine effort to supply to them
the artist's perception or student's insight,
which alone could fuse them into social con-
sciousness. It would further stand that the
scholars among us continued with yet more
research, that the educators were concerned
only with the young and the promising, and
the philanthropists with the criminals and
helpless.
There is a pitiful failure to recognize the
situation in which the majority of working
207
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
people are placed, a tendency to ignore
their real experiences and needs, and, most
stupid of all, we leave quite untouched
affections and memories which would afford
a tremendous dynamic if they were util-
ized.
We constantly hear it said in educational
circles, that a child learns only by " doing,"
and that education must proceed " through the
eyes and hands to the brain"; and yet for the
vast number of people all around us who do
not need to have activities artificially pro-
vided, and who use their hands and eyes all
the time, we do not seem able to reverse the
process. We quote the dictum, " What is
learned in the schoolroom must be applied in
the workshop," and yet the skill and handi-
craft constantly used in the workshop have no
relevance or meaning given to them by the
school ; and when we do try to help the
workingman in an educational way, we com-
pletely ignore his everyday occupation. Yet
the task is merely one of adaptation. It is to
take actual conditions and to make them the
208
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
basis for a large and generous method of
education, to perform a difficult idealization
doubtless, but not an impossible one.
We apparently believe that the working-
man has no chance to realize life through his
vocation. We easily recognize the historic
association in regard to ancient buildings.
We say that "generation after generation
have stamped their mark upon them, have
recorded their thoughts in them, until they
have become the property of all." And yet
this is even more true of the instruments of
labor, which have constantly been held in
human hands. A machine really represents
the " seasoned life of man " preserved and
treasured up within itself, quite as much as
an ancient building does. At present, work-
men are brought in contact with the machin-
ery with which they work as abruptly as if
the present set of industrial implements had
been newly created. They handle the ma-
chinery day by day, without any notion of
its gradual evolution and growth. Few of
the men who perform the mechanical work
p 209
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
in the great factories have any comprehension
of the fact that the inventions upon which
the factory depends, the instruments which
they use, have been slowly worked out, each
generation using the gifts of the last and
transmitting the inheritance until it has be-
come a social possession. This can only be
understood by a man who has obtained some
idea of social progress. We are still child-
ishly pleased when we see the further sub-
division of labor going on, because the
quantity of the output is increased thereby,
and we apparently are unable to take our
attention away from the product long enough
to really focus it upon the producer. Theo-
retically, " the division of labor " makes men
more interdependent and human by draw-
ing them together into a unity of purpose.
" If a number of people decide to build a
road, and one digs, and one brings stones,
and another breaks them, they are quite
inevitably united by their interest in the
road. But this naturally presupposes that
they know where the road is going to, that
2IO
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
they have some curiosity and interest about
it, and perhaps a chance to travel upon it."
If the division of labor robs them of interest
in any part of it, the mere mechanical fact
of interdependence amounts to nothing.
The man in the factory, as well as the
man with the hoe, has a grievance beyond
being overworked and disinherited, in that
he does not know what it is all about. We
may well regret the passing of the time
when the variety of work performed in the
unspecialized workshop naturally stimulated
the intelligence of the workingmen and
brought them into contact both with the
raw material and the finished product. But
the problem of education, as any advanced
educator will tell us, is to supply the essen-
tials of experience by a short cut, as it were.
If the shop constantly tends to make the
workman a specialist, then the problem of
the educator in regard to him is quite clear :
it is to give him what may be an offset from
the over-specialization of his daily work,
to supply him with general information and
211
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
to insist that he shall be a cultivated mem-
ber of society with a consciousness of his
industrial and social value.
As sad a sight as an old hand-loom worker
in a factory attempting ^o make his clumsy
machine compete with the flying shuttles
about him, is a workingman equipped with
knowledge so meagre that he can get no
meaning into his life nor sequence between
his acts and the far-off results.
Manufacturers, as a whole, however, when
they attempt educational institutions in con-
nection with their factories, are prone to
follow conventional lines, and to exhibit the
weakness of imitation. We find, indeed,
that the middle-class educator constantly
makes the mistakes of the middle-class
moralist when he attempts to aid working
people. The latter has constantly and tra-
ditionally urged upon the workingman
the specialized virtues of thrift, industry,
and sobriety — all virtues pertaining to the
individual. When each man had his own
shop, it was perhaps wise to lay almost
212
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
exclusive stress upon the industrial virtues
of diligence and thrift ; but as industry
has become more highly organized, life be-
comes incredibly complex and interdepend-
ent. If a workingman is to have a con-
ception of his value at all, he must see
industry in its unity and entirety ; he must
have a conception that will include not
only himself and his immediate family and
community, but the industrial organization
as a whole. It is doubtless true that dex-
terity of hand becomes less and less imper-
ative as the invention of machinery and
subdivision of labor proceeds; but it be-
comes all the more necessary, if the work-
man is to save his life at all, that he
should get a sense of his individual rela-
tion to the system. Feeding a machine
with a material of which he has no knowl-
edge, producing a product, totally unrelated
to the rest of his life, without in the least
knowing what becomes of it, or its connec-
tion with the community, is, of course, un-
questionably deadening to his intellectual
213
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and moral life. To make the moral connec-
tion it would be necessary to give him a so-
cial consciousness of the value of his work, and
at least a sense of participation and a certain
joy in its ultimate use; to make the intel-
lectual connection it would be essential to
create in him some historic conception of
the development of industry and the relation
of his individual work to it.
Workingmen themselves have made at-
tempts in both directions, which it would
be well for moralists and educators to
study. It is a striking fact that when
workingmen formulate their own moral
code, and try to inspire and encourage
each other, it is always a large and gen-
eral doctrine which they preach. They
were the first class of men to organize an
international association, and the constant
talk at a modern labor meeting is of soli-
darity and of the identity of the interests
of workingmen the world over. It is diffi-
cult to secure a successful organization of
men into the simplest trades organization
214
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
without an appeal to the most abstract
principles of justice and brotherhood. As
they have formulated their own morals by
laying the greatest stress upon the largest
morality, so if they could found their own
schools, it is doubtful whether they would
be of the mechanic institute type. Courses
of study arranged by a group of working-
men are most naive in their breadth and
generality. They will select the history of
the world in preference to that of any
period or nation. The "wonders of sci-
ence " or " the story of evolution " will
attract workingmen to a lecture when zool-
ogy or chemistry will drive them away.
The " outlines of literature " or " the best
in literature " will draw an audience when
a lecturer in English poetry will be solitary.
This results partly from a wholesome desire
to have general knowledge before special
knowledge, and is partly a rebound from
the specialization of labor to which the
workingman is subjected. When he is
free from work and can direct his own
215
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
mind, he tends to roam, to dwell upon
large themes. Much the same tendency is
found in programmes of study arranged by
Woman's Clubs in country places. The
untrained mind, wearied with meaningless
detail, when it gets an opportunity to
make its demand heard, asks for general
philosophy and background.
In a certain sense commercialism itself,
at least in its larger aspect, tends to educate
the workingman better than organized edu-
cation does. Its interests are certainly
world-wide and democratic, while it is abso-
lutely undiscriminating as to country and
creed, coming into contact with all climes
and races. If this aspect of commercialism
were utilized, it would in a measure counter-
balance the tendency which results from the
subdivision of labor.
The most noteworthy attempt to utilize
this democracy of commerce in relation to
manufacturing is found at Dayton, Ohio,
in the yearly gatherings held in a large
factory there. Once a year the entire force
216
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
is gathered together to hear the returns of
the business, not so much in respect to the
profits, as in regard to its extension. At
these meetings, the travelHng salesmen from
various parts of the world — from Constanti-
nople, from Berlin, from Rome, from Hong
Kong — report upon the sales they have
made, and the methods of advertisement and
promotion adapted to the various countries.
Stereopticon lectures are given upon each
new country as soon as it has been success-
fully invaded by the product of the factory.
The foremen in the various departments of
the factory give accounts of the increased
efficiency and the larger output over former
years. Any man who has made an inven-
tion in connection with the machinery of
the factory, at this time publicly receives a
prize, and suggestions are approved that
tend to increase the comfort and social facili-
ties of the employees. At least for the mo-
ment there is a complete esprit de corps,
and the youngest and least skilled employee
sees himself in connection with the interests
217
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
of the firm, and the spread of an invention.
It is a crude example of what might be done
in the way of giving a large framework of
meaning to factory labor, and of putting it
into a sentient background, at least on the
commercial side.
It is easy to indict the educator, to say
that he has gotten entangled in his own
material, and has fallen a victim to his own
methods ; but granting this, what has the
artist done about it — he who is supposed to
have a more intimate insight into the needs
of his contemporaries, and to minister to
them as none other can ?
It is quite true that a few writers are
insisting that the growing desire for labor,
on the part of many people of leisure, has
its counterpart in the increasing desire for
general knowledge on the part of many
laborers. They point to the fact that the
same duality of conscience which seems to
stifle the noblest effort in the individual be-
cause his intellectual conception and his
achievement are so difficult to bring to-
218
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
gether, Is found on a large scale in society
itself, when we have the separation of the
people who think from those who work.
And yet, since Ruskin ceased, no one has
really formulated this in a convincing form.
And even Ruskin's famous dictum, that labor
without art brutalizes, has always been inter-
preted as if art could only be a sense of
beauty or joy in one's own work, and not
a sense of companionship with all other
workers. The situation demands the con-
sciousness of participation and well-being
which comes to the individual when he is
able to see himself "in connection and co-
operation with the whole " ; it needs the
solace of collective art inherent in collective
labor.
As the poet bathes the outer world for us
in the hues of human feeling, so the work-
man needs some one to bathe his surround-
ings with a human significance — some one
who shall teach him to find that which will
give a potency to his life. His education,
however simple, should tend to make him
219
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
widely at home in the world, and to give
him a sense of simplicity and peace in the
midst of the triviality and noise to which he
is constantly subjected. He, like other men,
can learn to be content to see but a part,
although it must be a part of something.
It is because of a lack of democracy that
we do not really incorporate him in the hopes
and advantages of society, and give him the
place which is his by simple right. We have
learned to say that the good must be ex-
tended to all of society before it can be held
secure by any one person or any one class ;
but we have not yet learned to add to that
statement, that unless all men and all classes
contribute to a good, we cannot even be
sure that it is worth having. In spite of
many attempts we do not really act upon
either statement.
220
CHAPTER VII
Political Reform
Throughout this volume we have assumed
that much of our ethical maladjustment in
social affairs arises from the fact that we are
acting upon a code of ethics adapted to
individual relationships, but not to the larger
social relationships to which it is bunglingly
applied. In addition, however, to the con-
sequent strain and difficulty, there is often
an honest lack of perception as to what the
situation demands.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in our
political life as it manifests itself in certain
quarters of every great city. It is most dif- | ^^
ficult to hold to our political democracy and
to make it in any sense a social expression
and not a mere governmental contrivance,
unless we take pains to keep on common
221 '
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
ground in our human experiences. Other-
wise there is in various parts of the com-
munity an inevitable difference of ethical
standards which becomes responsible for
much misunderstanding.
It is difficult both to interpret sympatheti-
cally the motives and ideals of those who
have acquired rules of conduct in experience
widely different from our own, and also to
take enough care in guarding the gains
already made, and in valuing highly enough
the imperfect good so painfully acquired
and, at the best, so mixed with evil. This
wide difference in daily experience exhibits
itself in two distinct attitudes toward politics.
The well-to-do men of the community think
of politics as something off by itself; they
may conscientiously recognize political duty
as part of good citizenship, but political effort
is not the expression of their moral or social
life. As a result of this detachment, " reform
movements," started by business men and
the better element, are almost wholly occu-
pied in the correction of political machinery
222
POLITICAL REFORM
and with a concern for the better method of
administration, rather than with the ultimate '
purpose of securing the welfare of the peo-
ple. They fix their attention so exclusively
on methods that they fail to consider the
final aims of city government. This ac-
counts for the growing tendency to put
more and more responsibility upon execu-
tive officers and appointed commissions at
the expense of curtailing the power of the
direct representatives of the voters. Reform
movements tend to become negative and
to lose their educational value for the mass
of the people. The reformers take the role
of the opposition. They give themselves
largely to criticisms of the present state of
affairs, to writing and talking of what the
future must be and of certain results which
should be obtained. In trying to better
matters, however, they have in mind only
political achievements which they detach in
a curious way from the rest of life, and they
speak and write of the purification of politics
as of a thing set apart from daily life.
223
y
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
On the other hand, the real leaders of the
people are part of the entire life of the com-
munity which they control, and so far as they
are representative at all, are giving a social
expression to democracy. They are often po-
litically corrupt, but in spite of this they are
proceeding upon a sounder theory. Although
they would be totally unable to give it abstract
expression, they are really acting upon a for-
mulation made by a shrewd English observer ;
namely, that, "after the enfranchisement of
the masses, social ideals enter into political
programmes, and they enter not as something
which at best can be indirectly promoted by
government, but as something which it is
the chief business of government to advance
directly."
Men living near to the masses of voters,
} and knowing them intimately, recognize this
j and act upon it ; they minister directly to
' life and to social needs. They realize that
i the people as a whole are clamoring for social
results, and they hold their power because
they respond to that demand. They are
224
POLITICAL REFORM
corrupt and often do their work badly ; but
they at least avoid the mistake of a certain
type of business men who are frightened by//
democracy, and have lost their faith in the.
people. The two standards are similar to
those seen at a popular exhibition of pictures
where the cultivated people care most for
the technique of a given painting, the mov-
ing mass for a subject that shall be domes-
tic and human.
This difference may be illustrated by the
writer's experience in a certain ward of Chi-
cago, during three campaigns, when efforts
were made to dislodge an alderman who had
represented the ward for many years. In
this ward there are gathered together fifty
thousand people, representing a score of na-
tionalities ; the newly emigrated Latin, Teu-
ton, Celt, Greek, and Slav who live there have
little in common save the basic experiences
which come to men in all countries and un-
der all conditions. In order to make fifty
thousand people, so heterogeneous in nation-
ality, religion, and customs, agree upon 'any
Q 225
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
demand, it must be founded upon universal
experiences which are perforce individual
and not social.
An instinctive recognition of this on the
part of the alderman makes it possible to
/ understand the individualistic basis of his
political success, but it remains extremely
difficult to ascertain the reasons for the ex-
treme leniency of judgment concerning the
political corruption of which he is constantly
guilty.
This leniency is only to be explained on
the ground that his constituents greatly
admire individual virtues, and that they are
at the same time unable to perceive social
outrages which the alderman may be com-
mitting. They thus free the alderman from
blame because his corruption is social, and
they honestly admire him as a great man and
hero, because his individual acts are on the
whole kindly and generous.
In certain stages of moral evolution, a man
is incapable of action unless the results will
benefit himself or some one of his acquaint-
226
POLITICAL REFORM
ances, and it is a long step in moral progress
to set the good of the many before the inter-
est of the few, and to be concerned for thq
welfare of a community without hope ol
an individual return. How far the selfish'
politician befools his constituents into believ-
ing that their interests are identical with his
own ; how far he presumes upon their inabil-
ity to distinguish between the individual
and social virtues, an inability which he
himself shares with them ; and how far he
dazzles them by the sense of his great-
ness, and a conviction that they participate
therein, it is diflficult to determine.
Morality certainly develops far earlier in
the form of moral fact than in the form of
moral ideas, and it is obvious that ideas only
operate upon the popular mind through will
and character, and must be dramatized be-
fore they reach the mass of men, even as
the biography of the saints have been after
all " the main guide to the stumbling feet of
thousands of Christians to whom the Credo
has been but mysterious words."
227
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
\Ethics as well as political opinions may
be discussed and disseminated among the
sophisticated by lectures and printed pages,
but to the common people they can only
come through example — through a person-
ality which seizes the popular imagination.
The advantage of an unsophisticated neigh-
borhood is, that the inhabitants do not keep
their ideas as treasures — they are untouched
by the notion of accumulating them, as they
might knowledge or money, and they frankly
act upon those they have. The personal ex-
ample promptly rouses to emulation. In a
neighborhood where political standards are
plastic and undeveloped, and where there
has been little previous experience in self-
government, the office-holder himself sets
the standard, and the ideas that cluster
around him exercise a specific and perma-
nent influence upon the political morality of
his constituents.
Nothing is more certain than that the
quality which a heterogeneous population,
living in one of the less sophisticated wards,
228
POLITICAL REFORM
most admires is the quality of simple good-
ness ; that the man who attracts them is the
one whom they believe to be a good man.
We all know that children long "to be
good " with an intensity which they give to
no other ambition. We can all remember
that the earliest strivings of our childhood
were in this direction, and that we vener-
ated grown people because they had attained
perfection.
Primitive people, such as the South Italian
peasants, are still in this stage. They want
to be good, and deep down in their hearts
they admire nothing so much as the good
man. Abstract virtues are too difficult for
their untrained minds to apprehend, and
many of them are still simple enough to
believe that power and wealth come only to
good people.
The successful candidate, then, must be a
good man according to the morality of his'ly f/:
constituents. He must not attempt to hold |-
up too high a standard, nor must he attempt ■ '
to reform or change their standards. His i
229
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
safety lies in doing on a large scale the good
deeds which his constituents are able to do
only on a small scale. If he believes what
they believe and does what they are all
cherishing a secret ambition to do, he will
dazzle them by his success and win their
confidence. There is a certain wisdom in
this course. There is a common sense in
the mass of men which cannot be neglected
with impunity, just as there is sure to be
an eccentricity in the differing and reform-
ing individual which it is perhaps well to
challenge.
The constant kindness of the poor to each
other was pointed out in a previous chapter,
and that they unfailingly respond to the need
and distresses of their poorer neighbors even
when in danger of bankruptcy themselves.
The kindness which a poor man shows his
distressed neighbor is doubtless heightened
by the consciousness that he himself may be
in distress next week; he therefore stands
by his friend when he gets too drunk to take
care of himself, when he loses his wife or
230
POLITICAL REFORM
child, when he is evicted for non-payment of
rent, when he is arrested for a petty crime.
It seems to such a man entirely fitting that
his alderman should do the same thing on a
larger scale — that he should help a constit-
uent out of trouble, merely because he is in
trouble, irrespective of the justice involved.
The alderman therefore bails out his con-
stituents when they are arrested, or says a
good word to the police justice when they
appear before him for trial, uses his pull with
the magistrate when they are likely to be
fined for a civil misdemeanor, or sees what
he can do to " fix up matters " with the
state's attorney when the charge is really a
serious one, and in doing this he follows the
ethics held and practised by his constituents.
All this conveys the impression to the sim-
ple-minded that law is not enforced, if the
lawbreaker have a powerful friend. One
may instance the alderman's action in stand-
ing by an Italian padrone of the ward when
he was indicted for violating the civil ser-
vice regulations. The commissioners had
231
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
sent out notices to certain Italian day-labor-
ers who were upon the eligible list that they
were to report for work at a given day and
hour. One of the padrones intercepted
these notifications and sold them to the men
for five dollars apiece, making also the usual
bargain for a share of their wages. The pa-
drone's entire arrangement followed the cus-
tom which had prevailed for years before the
establishment of civil service laws. Ten of
the laborers swore out warrants against the
padrone, who was convicted and fined seventy-
five dollars. This sum was promptly paid
by the alderman, and the padrone, assured
that he would be protected from any further
trouble, returned uninjured to the colony.
The simple Italians were much bewildered
by this show of a power stronger than that
of the civil service, which they had trusted
as they did the one in Italy. The first vio-
lation of its authority was made, and various
sinister acts have followed, until no Italian
who is digging a sewer or sweeping a street
for the city feels quite secure in holding his
232
POLITICAL REFORM
job unless he is backed by the friendship of
the alderman. According to the civil ser-
vice law, a laborer has no right to a trial;
many are discharged by the foreman, and
find that they can be reinstated only upon*
the aldermanic recommendation. He thus \{)JdijUAvvM
practically holds his old power over the
laborers working for the city. The popular
mind is convinced that an honest administra-
tion of civil service is impossible, and that
it is but one more instrument in the hands
of the powerful.
It will be difficult to establish genuine
civil service among these men, who learn
only by experience, since their experiences
have been of such a nature that their unani-
mous vote would certainly be that "civil
service " is " no good."
As many of his constituents in this case
are impressed with the fact that the aider-
manic power is superior to that of govern-
ment, so instances of actual lawbreaking
might easily be cited. A young man may
enter a saloon long after midnight, the legal
233
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
closing hour, and seat himself at a gambling
table, perfectly secure from interruption or
arrest, because the place belongs to an alder-
man; but in order to secure this immunity
the policeman on the beat must pretend not
to see into the windows each time that he
passes, and he knows, and the young man
knows that he knows, that nothing would
embarrass " Headquarters " more than to
have an arrest made on those premises.
A certain contempt for the whole ma-
chinery of law and order is thus easily
fostered.
Because of simple friendliness the alder-
man is expected to pay rent for the hard-
pressed tenant when no rent is forthcoming,
to find "jobs" when work is hard to get, to
procure and divide among his constituents
all the places which he can seize from the
city hall. The alderman of the ward we
are considering at one time could make
the proud boast that he had twenty-six
hundred people in his ward upon the pub-
lic pay-roll. This, of course, included day
234
POLITICAL REFORM
laborers, but each one felt under distinct
obligations to him for getting a position.
When we reflect that this is one-third of
the entire vote of the ward, we realize thatj
it is very important to vote for the right
man, since there is, at the least, one chance
out of three for securing work.
If we recollect further that the franchise-
seeking companies pay respectful heed to
the applicants backed by the alderman, the
question of voting for the successful man
becomes as much an industrial one as a
political one. An Italian laborer wants a
"job" more than anything else, and quite
simply votes for the man who promises
him one. It is not so different from his
relation to the padrone, and, indeed, the
two strengthen each other.
The alderman may himself be quite sin-
cere in his acts of kindness, for an office
seeker may begin with the simple desire
to alleviate suffering, and this may gradu-
ally change into the desire to put his con-
stituents under obligations to him ; but the
235
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
action of such an individual becomes a
demoralizing element in the community
when kindly impulse is made a cloak for
the satisfaction of personal ambition, and
when the plastic morals of his constituents
gradually conform to his own undeveloped
standards.
The alderman gives presents at weddings
and christenings. He seizes these days of
family festivities for making friends. It is
easiest to reach them in the holiday mood
of expansive good-will, but on their side it
seems natural and kindly that he should
do it. The alderman procures passes from
the railroads when his constituents wish
to visit friends or attend the funerals of
distant relatives ; he buys tickets galore for
benefit entertainments given for a widow
or a consumptive in peculiar distress ; he
contributes to prizes which are awarded to
the handsomest lady or the most popular
man. At a church bazaar, for instance,
the alderman finds the stage all set for
his dramatic performance. When others
236
POLITICAL REFORM
are spending pennies, he is spending dol-
lars. When anxious relatives are canvass-
ing' to secure votes for the two most
beautiful children who are being voted
upon, he recklessly buys votes from both
sides, and laughingly declines to say which
one he likes best, buying off the young
lady who is persistently determined to find
out, with five dollars for the flower bazaar,
the posies, of course, to be sent to the sick
of the parish. The moral atmosphere of a
bazaar suits him exactly. He murmurs
many times, " Never mind, the money all
goes to the poor; it is all straight enough
if the church gets it, the poor won't ask
too many questions." The oftener he can
put such sentiments into the minds of his
constituents, the better he is pleased. Noth-
ing so rapidly prepares them to take his
view of money getting and money spend-
ing. We see again the process disregarded,
because the end itself is considered so praise-
worthy.
There is something archaic in a com-
237
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
munity of simple people in their attitude
toward death and burial. There is noth-
ing so easy to collect money for as a
funeral, and one involuntarily remembers
^jthat the early religious tithes were paid to
Iward off death and ghosts. At times one
encounters almost the Greek feeling in re-
gard to burial. If the alderman seizes
upon times of festivities for expressions of
his good-will, much more does he seize
upon periods of sorrow. At a funeral he
has the double advantage of ministering
to a genuine craving for comfort and sol-
ace, and at the same time of assisting a
bereaved constituent to express that curious
feeling of remorse, which is ever an accom-
paniment of quick sorrow, that desire to
*' make up " for past delinquencies, to show
the world how much he loved the person
who has just died, which is as natural as
it is universal.
In addition to this, there is, among the
poor, who have few social occasions, a
great desire for a well-arranged funeral, the
238
POLITICAL REFORM
grade of which almost determines their
social standing in the neighborhood. The
alderman saves the very poorest of his con-
stituents from that awful horror of burial
by the county; he provides carriages for
the poor, who otherwise could not have
them. It may be too much to say that all
the relatives and friends who ride in the
carriages provided by the alderman's bounty
vote for him, but they are certainly influ-
enced by his kindness, and talk of his vir-
tues during the long hours of the ride
back and forth from the suburban ceme-
tery. A man who would ask at such a
time where all the money thus spent comes
from would be considered sinister. The
tendency to speak lightly of the faults
of the dead and to judge them gently is
transferred to the living, and many a man
at such a time has formulated a lenient
judgment of political corruption, and has
heard kindly speeches which he has re-
membered on election day. " Ah, well, he
has a big Irish heart. He is good to the
239
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
widow and the fatherless.'* " He knows
the poor better than the big guns who
are always talking about civil service and
reform."
Indeed, what headway can the notion of
civic purity, of honesty of administration
make against this big manifestation of
human friendliness, this stalking survival
of village kindness.'* The notions of the
civic reformer are negative and impotent
before it. Such an alderman will keep a
standing account with an undertaker, and
telephone every week, and sometimes more
than once, the kind of funeral he wishes
provided for a bereaved constituent, until the
sum may roll up into "hundreds a year." He
understands what the people want, and min-
isters just as truly to a great human need as
the musician or the artist. An attempt to
substitute what we might call a later stand-
ard was made at one time when a delicate
little child was deserted in the Hull-House
nursery. An investigation showed that it
had been born ten days previously in the
240
POLITICAL REFORM
Cook County hospital, but no trace could be
found of the unfortunate mother. The little
child lived for several weeks, and then, in
spite of every care, died. It was decided to
have it buried by the county authorities, and
the wagon was to arrive at eleven o'clock;
about nine o'clock in the morning the rumor
of this awful deed reached the neighbors.
A half dozen of them came, in a very
excited state of mind, to protest. They took
up a collection out of their poverty with
which to defray a funeral. The residents of
Hull- House were then comparatively new in
the neighborhood and did not realize that
they were really shocking a genuine moral
sentiment of the community. In their crude-
ness they instanced the care and tenderness
which had been expended upon the little
creature while it was alive ; that it had had
every attention from a skilled physician and
a trained nurse, and even intimated that the
excited members of the group had not taken
part in this, and that it now lay with the
nursery to decide that it should be buried as
R 241
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
it had been born, at the county's expense.
It is doubtful if Hull- House has ever done
anything which injured it so deeply in the
minds of some of its neighbors. It was
only forgiven by the most indulgent on the
ground that the residents were spinsters, and
could not know a mother's heart. No one
born and reared in the community could
possibly have made a mistake like that. No
one who had studied the ethical standards
with any care could have bungled so
completely.
We are constantly underestimating the
amount of sentiment among simple people.
The songs which are most popular among
them are those of a reminiscent old age, in
which the ripened soul calmly recounts and
regrets the sins of his youth, songs in
which the wayward daughter is forgiven
by her loving parents, in which the lovers
are magnanimous and faithful through all
vicissitudes. The tendency is to condone
and forgive, and not hold too rigidly to a
standard. In the theatres it is the magnani-
242
POLITICAL REFORM
mous man, the kindly reckless villain who is
always applauded. So shrewd an observer
as Samuel Johnson once remarked that it
was surprising to find how much more kind-
ness than justice society contained.
On the same basis the alderman manages
several saloons, one down town within easy
access of the city hall, where he can catch
the more important of his friends. Here
again he has seized upon an old tradition
and primitive custom, the good fellowship
which has long been best expressed when
men drink together. The saloons offer a
common meeting ground, with stimulus
enough to free the wits and tongues of the
men who meet there.
He distributes each Christmas many tons
of turkeys not only to voters, but to families
who are represented by no vote. By a judi-
cious management some families get three
or four turkeys apiece ; but what of that, the
alderman has none of the nagging rules of
the charitable societies, nor does he de-
clare that because a man wants two tur-
243
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
keys for Christmas, he is a scoundrel who
shall never be allowed to eat turkey again.
As he does not distribute his Christmas
favors from any hardly acquired philan-
thropic motive, there is no disposition to
apply the carefully evolved rules of the
charitable societies to his beneficiaries. Of
course, there are those who suspect that the
benevolence rests upon self-seeking motives,
and feel themselves quite freed from any
sense of gratitude ; others go further and
glory in the fact that they can thus " soak
the alderman." An example of this is the
young man who fills his pockets with a hand-
ful of cigars, giving a sly wink at the others.
But this freedom from any sense of obli-
gation is often the first step downward to
the position where he is willing to sell his
vote to both parties, and then scratch his
ticket as he pleases. The writer recalls a
conversation with a man in which he com-
plained quite openly, and with no sense of
shame, that his vote had " sold for only two
dollars this year," and that he was *' awfully
244
POLITICAL REFORM
disappointed." The writer happened to know
that his income during the nine months
previous had been but twenty-eight dollars,
and that he was in debt thirty-two dollars,
and she could well imagine the eagerness
with which he had counted upon this source
of revenue. After some years the selling
of votes becomes a commonplace, and but
little attempt is made upon the part of
the buyer or seller to conceal the fact, if
the transaction runs smoothly.
A certain lodging-house keeper at one
time sold the votes of his entire house to
a political party and was "well paid for it
too " ; but being of a grasping turn, he also
sold the house for the same election to the
rival party. Such an outrage could not be
borne. The man was treated to a modern
version of tar and feathers, and as a result of
being held under a street hydrant in Novem-
ber, contracted pneumonia which resulted
in his death. No official investigation took
place, since the doctor's certificate of pneu-
monia was sufficient for legal burial, and
245
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
public sentiment sustained the action. In
various conversations which the writer had
concerning the entire transaction, she dis-
covered great indignation concerning his
duplicity and treachery, but none whatever
for his original offence of selling out the
votes of his house.
A club will be started for the express pur-
pose of gaining a reputation for political
power which may later be sold out. The
president and executive committee of such
a club, who will naturally receive the funds,
promise to divide with "the boys" who
swell the size of the membership. A reform
movement is at first filled with recruits who
are active and loud in their assertions of the
number of votes they can "deliver." The
reformers are delighted with this display of
zeal, and only gradually find out that many
of the recruits are there for the express pur-
pose of being bought by the other side ; that
they are most active in order to seem valu-
able, and thus raise the price of their alle-
giance when they are ready to sell. Reformers
246
POLITICAL REFORM
seeing them drop away one by one, talk of
desertion from the ranks of reform, and of the
power of money over well-meaning men, who
are too weak to withstand temptation ; but
in reality the men are not deserters because
they have never actually been enrolled in
the ranks. The money they take is neither
a bribe nor the price of their loyalty, it is
simply the consummation of a long-cherished
plan and a well-earned reward. They came
into the new movement for the purpose of
being bought out of it, and have success-
fully accomplished that purpose.
Hull- House assisted in carrying on two un-
successful campaigns against the same alder-
man. In the two years following the end of
the first one, nearly every man who had been
prominent in it had received an office from
the reelected alderman. A printer had been
appointed to a clerkship in the city hall ; a
driver received a large salary for services in
the police barns; the candidate himself, a
bricklayer, held a position in the city con-
struction department. At the beginning of
247
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
the next campaign, the greatest difficulty
was experienced in finding a candidate, and
each one proposed, demanded time to con-
sider the proposition. During this period
he invariably became the recipient of the
alderman's bounty. The first one, who was
foreman of a large factory, was reported to
have been bought off by the promise that
the city institutions would use the product
of his firm. The second one, a keeper of
a grocery and family saloon, with large pop-
ularity, was promised the aldermanic nomi-
nation on the regular ticket at the expiration
of the term of office held by the alderman's
colleague, and it may be well to state in
passing that he was thus nominated and
successfully elected. The third proposed
candidate received a place for his son in the
office of the city attorney.
Not only are offices in his gift, but all
smaller favors as well. Any requests to the
council, or special licenses, must be pre-
sented by the alderman of the ward in
which the person desiring the favor resides.
248
There
aldern
gation
stituen
large i
at all.
a licens
large m
tunnel
pipes fi
body is
and is c
these very regulations for presenting re-
quests to the council have been made, by
the aldermen themselves, for the express
purpose of increasing the dependence of
their constituents, and thereby augmenting
aldermanic power and prestige.
The alderman has also a very singular
hold upon the property owners of his ward.
The paving, both of the streets and side-
walks throughout his district, is disgraceful ;
and in the election speeches the reform side
holds him responsible for this condition, and
249
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
promises better paving under another regime.
But the paving could not be made better
without a special assessment upon the prop-
erty owners of the vicinity, and paying
more taxes is exactly what his constituents
do not want to do. In reality, "getting
them off," or at the worst postponing the
time of the improvement, is one of the gen-
uine favors which he performs. A move-
ment to have the paving done from a
general fund would doubtless be opposed by
the property owners in other parts of the city
who have already paid for the asphalt bor-
dering their own possessions, but they have
no conception of the struggle and possible
bankruptcy which repaving may mean to
the small property owner, nor how his chief
concern may be to elect an alderman who
cares more for the feelings and pocket-books
of his constituents than he does for the
repute and cleanliness of his city.
The alderman exhibited great wisdom in
procuring from certain of his down-town
friends the sum of three thousand dollars
250
POLITICAL REFORM
with which to uniform and equip a boys'
temperance brigade which had been formed
in one of the ward churches a few months
before his campaign. Is it strange that the
good leader, whose heart was filled with in-
nocent pride as he looked upon these prom-
ising young scions of virtue, should decline
to enter into a reform campaign ? Of what
use to suggest that uniforms and bayonets
for the purpose of promoting temperance,
bought with money contributed by a man
who was proprietor of a saloon and a gam-
bling house, might perhaps confuse the
ethics of the young soldiers ? Why take
the pains to urge that it was vain to lecture
and march abstract virtues into them, so
long as the "champion boodler" of the town
was the man whom the boys recognized as
a loyal and kindhearted friend, the public-
spirited citizen, whom their fathers enthu-
siastically voted for, and their mothers called
"the friend of the poor." As long as the
actual and tangible success is thus embodied,
marching whether in kindergartens or bri-
251
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
gades, talking whether in clubs or classes,
does little to change the code of ethics.
The question of where does the money
come from which is spent so successfully,
does of course occur to many minds. The
more primitive people accept the truth-
ful statement of its sources without any
shock to their moral sense. To their sim-
ple minds he gets it " from the rich " and,
so long as he again gives it out to the poor
as a true Robin Hood, with open hand, they
have no objections to offer. Their ethics
are quite honestly those of the merry-mak-
ing foresters. The next less primitive peo-
ple of the vicinage are quite willing to admit
that he leads the " gang " in the city council,
and sells out the city franchises; that he
makes deals with the franchise-seeking com-
panies ; that he guarantees to steer dubious
measures through the council, for which he
demands liberal pay ; that he is, in short, a
successful "boodler." When, however, there
is intellect enough to get this point of view,
there is also enough to make the contention
252
POLITICAL REFORM
that this is universally done, that all the al-
dermen do it more or less successfully, but
that the alderman of this particular ward is
unique in being so generous; that such a
state of affairs is to be deplored, of course ;
but that that is the way business is run,
and we are fortunate when a kind-hearted
man who is close to the people gets a
large share of the spoils; that he serves
franchised companies who employ men in
the building and construction of their en-
terprises, and that they are bound in return
to give work to his constituents. It is
again the justification of stealing from the
rich to give to the poor. Even when they
are intelligent enough to complete the circle,
and to see that the money comes, not from
the pockets of the companies' agents, but
from the street-car fares of people like them-
selves, it almost seems as if they would
rather pay two cents more each time they
ride than to give up the consciousness that
they have a big, warm-hearted friend at court
who will stand by them in an emergency.
253
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
The sense of just dealing comes apparently
much later than the desire for protection
and indulgence. On the whole, the gifts and
favors are taken quite simply as an evidence
of genuine loving-kindness. The alderman
is really elected because he is a good friend
and neighbor. He is corrupt, of course, but
he is not elected because he is corrupt, but
rather in spite of it. His standard suits
his constituents. He exemplifies and exag-
gerates the popular type of a good man. He
has attained what his constituents secretly
long for.
At one end of the ward there is a street
of good houses, familiarly called " Con Row."
The term is perhaps quite unjustly used, but
it is nevertheless universally applied, because
many of these houses are occupied by pro-
fessional office holders. This row is sup-
posed to form a happy hunting-ground of
the successful politician, where he can live
in prosperity, and still maintain his vote
and influence in the ward. It would be
difiicult to justly estimate the influence
2S4
«
POLITICAL REFORM
which this group of successful, prominent
men, including the alderman who lives
there, have had upon the ideals of the
.youth in the vicinity. The path which
leads to riches and success, to civic prom-
inence and honor, is the path of political
corruption. We might compare this to
the path laid out by Benjamin Franklin,
who also secured all of these things, but
told young men that they could be obtained
only by strenuous effort and frugal living,
by the cultivation of the mind, and the
holding fast to righteousness; or, again, we
might compare it to the ideals which were
held up to the American youth fifty years
ago, lower, to be sure, than the revolution-
ary ideal, but still fine and aspiring toward
honorable dealing and careful living. They
were told that the career of the self-made
man was open to every American boy, if
he worked hard and saved his money, im-
proved his mind, and followed a steady ambi-
tion. The writer remembers that when she
was ten years old, the village schoolmaster
255
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
told his little flock, without any mitigating
clauses, that Jay Gould had laid the foun-
dation of his colossal fortune by always
saving bits of string, and that, as a result,
every child in the village assiduously col-
lected party-colored balls of twine. A bright
Chicago boy might well draw the inference
that the path of the corrupt politician not
only leads to civic honors, but to the glo-
ries of benevolence and philanthropy. This
lowering of standards, this setting of an
ideal, is perhaps the worst of the situation,
for, as we said in the first chapter, we de-
termine ideals by our daily actions and
decisions not only for ourselves, but largely
for each other.
We are all involved in this political cor-
ruption, and as members of the community
stand indicted. This is the penalty of a
democracy, — that we are bound to move
forward or retrograde together. None of
us can stand aside; our feet are mired in
the same soil, and our lungs breathe the
same air.
256
POLITICAL REFORM
That the alderman has much to do with
setting the standard of life and desirable
prosperity may be illustrated by the follow-
ing incident: During one of the campaigns
a clever cartoonist drew a poster represent-
ing the successful alderman in portraiture
drinking champagne at a table loaded with
pretentious dishes and surrounded by other
revellers. In contradistinction was his op-
ponent, a bricklayer, who sat upon a half-
finished wall, eating a meagre dinner from
a workingman's dinner-pail, and the passer-by
was asked which type of representative he
preferred, the presumption being that at
least in a workingman's district the brick-
layer would come out ahead. To the cha-
grin of the reformers, however, it was
gradually discovered that, in the popular
mind, a man who laid bricks and wore
overalls was not nearly so desirable for an
alderman as the man who drank cham-
pagne and wore a diamond in his shirt
front. The district wished its representa-
tive "to stand up with the best of them,"
s 257
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and certainly some of the constituents
would have been ashamed to have been
represented by a bricklayer. It is part of
that general desire to appear well, the opti-
mistic and thoroughly American belief, that
even if a man is working with his hands
to-day, he and his children will quite likely
be in a better position in the swift coming
to-morrow, and there is no need of being
too closely associated with common work-
ing people. There is an honest absence
of class consciousness, and a naive belief
that the kind of occupation quite largely
determines social position. This is doubt-
less exaggerated in a neighborhood of
foreign people by the fact that as each
nationality becomes more adapted to Amer-
ican conditions, the scale of its occupation
rises. Fifty years ago in America " a
Dutchman " was used as a term of re-
proach, meaning a man whose language
was not understood, and who performed
menial tasks, digging sewers and building
railroad embankments. Later the Irish did
258
POLITICAL REFORM
the same work in the community, but as
quickly as possible handed it on to the Ital-
ians, to whom the name "dago" is said
to cling as a result of the digging which
the Irishman resigned to him. The Ital-
ian himself is at last waking up to this
fact. In a political speech recently made
by an Italian padrone, he bitterly reproached
the alderman for giving the-four-dollars-a-
day "jobs" of sitting in an office to Irish-
men and the-dollar-and-a-half-a-day "jobs" of
sweeping the streets to the Italians. This
general struggle to rise in life, to be at
least politically represented by one of the
best, as to occupation and social status, has
also its negative side. We must remember
that the imitative impulse plays an impor-
tant part in life, and that the loss of social
estimation, keenly felt by all of us, is perhaps
most dreaded by the humblest, among whom
freedom of individual conduct, the power
to give only just weight to the opinion
of neighbors, is but feebly developed. A
form of constraint, gentle, but powerful,
259
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
is afforded by the simple desire to do
what others do, in order to share with
them the approval of the community. Of
course, the larger the number of people
among whom an habitual mode of conduct
obtains, the greater the constraint it puts
upon the individual will. Thus it is that
the political corruption of the city presses
most heavily where it can be least resisted,
and is most likely to be imitated.
According to the same law, the positive
evils of corrupt government are bound to
fall heaviest upon the poorest and least
capable. When the water of Chicago is
foul, the prosperous buy water bottled at
distant springs; the poor have no alter-
native but the typhoid fever which comes
from using the city's supply. When the
garbage contracts are not enforced, the
well-to-do pay for private service ; the poor
suffer the discomfort and illness which are
inevitable from a foul atmosphere. The
prosperous business man has a certain
choice as to whether he will treat with
260
POLITICAL REFORM
the "boss" politician or preserve his inde-
pendence on a smaller income; but to an
Italian day laborer it is a choice between
obeying the commands of a political "boss"
or practical starvation. Again, a more in-
telligent man may philosophize a little
upon the present state of corruption, and
reflect that it is but a phase of our com-
mercialism, from which we are bound to
emerge; at any rate, he may give himself
the solace of literature and ideals in other
directions, but the more ignorant man who
lives only in the narrow present has no
such resource ; slowly the conviction enters
his mind that politics is a matter of favors
and positions, that self-government means
pleasing the "boss" and standing in with the
"gang." This slowly acquired knowledge he
hands on to his family. During the month
of February his boy may come home from
school with rather incoherent tales about
Washington and Lincoln, and the father
may for the moment be fired to tell of
Garibaldi, but such talk is only periodic,
261
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and the long year round the fortunes of
the entire family, down to the opportunity
to earn food and shelter, depend upon the
"boss."
In a certain measure also, the opportunities
for pleasure and recreation depend upon
him. To use a former illustration, if a man
happens to have a taste for gambling, if the
slot machine affords him diversion, he goes
to those houses which are protected by polit-
ical influence. If he and his friends like to
drop into a saloon after midnight, or even
want to hear a little music while they drink
together early in the evening, he is break-
ing the law when he indulges in either of
them, and can only be exempt from arrest
or fine because the great political machine
is friendly to him and expects his allegiance
in return.
During the campaigh, when it was found
hard to secure enough local speakers of
the moral tone which was desired, orators
were imported from other parts of the
town, from the so-called "better element."
262
POLITICAL REFORM
Suddenly it was rumored on all sides that,
while the money and speakers for the reform
candidate were coming from the swells, the
money which was backing the corrupt alder-
man also came from a swell source; that
the president of a street-car combination, for
whom he performed constant ofiBces in the
city council, was ready to back him to the
extent of fifty thousand dollars ; that this
president, too, was a good man, and sat in
high places ; that he had recently given a
large sum of money to an educational insti-
tution and was therefore as philanthropic,
not to say good and upright, as any man
in town; that the corrupt alderman had the
sanction of the highest authorities, and that
the lecturers who were talking against cor-
ruption, and the selling and buying of
franchises, were only the cranks, and not
the solid business men who had developed
and built up Chicago.
All parts of the community are bound
together in ethical development. If the so-
called more enlightened members accept
263
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
corporate gifts from the man who biiys up
the council, and the so-called less enlight-
ened members accept individual gifts from
the man who sells out the council, we surely
must take our punishment together. There
is the difference, of course, that in the first
case we act collectively, and in the second
case individually; but is the punishment
which follows the first any lighter or less far-
reaching in its consequences than the more
obvious one which follows the second?
Have our morals been so captured by
commercialism, to use Mr. Chapman's gener-
alization, that we do not see a moral derelic-
tion when business or educational interests
are served thereby, although we are still
shocked when the saloon interest is thus
served ?
The street-car company which declares that
it is impossible to do business without man-
aging the city council, is on exactly the
same moral level with the man who cannot
retain political power unless he has a saloon,
a large acquaintance with the semi-criminal
264
POLITICAL REFORM
class, and questionable money with which to
debauch his constituents. Both sets of men
assume that the only appeal possible is
along the line of self-interest. They frankly
acknowledge money getting as their own
motive power, and they believe in the cupid-
ity of all the men whom they encounter.
No attempt in either case is made to put
forward the claims of the public, or to find
a moral basis for action. As the corrupt
politician assumes that public morality is
impossible, so many business men become
convinced that to pay tribute to the corrupt
aldermen is on the whole cheaper than to
have taxes too high ; that it is better to pay
exorbitant rates for franchises, than to be
made unwilling partners in transportation
experiments. Such men come to regard
political reformers as a sort of monomaniac,
who are not reasonable enough to see the
necessity of the present arrangement which
has slowly been evolved and developed, and
upon which business is safely conducted.
A reformer who really knew the people
265
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
and their great human needs, who believed
that it was the business of government to
serve them, and who further recognized the
educative power of a sense of responsibil-
ity, would possess a clew by which he might
analyze the situation. He would find out
what needs, which the alderman supplies,
are legitimate ones which the city itself
could undertake, in counter-distinction to
those which pander to the lower instincts of
the constituency. A mother who eats her
Christmas turkey in a reverent spirit of
thankfulness to the alderman who gave it to
her, might be gradually brought to a genuine
sense of appreciation and gratitude to the
city which supplies her little children with
a Kindergarten, or, to the Board of Health
which properly placarded a case of scarlet-
fever next door and spared her sleepless
nights and wearing anxiety, as well as the
money paid with such difficulty to the doc-
tor and the druggist. The man who in his
emotional gratitude almost kneels before his
political friend who gets his boy out of jail,
266
POLITICAL REFORM
might be made to see the kindness and good
sense of the city authorities who provided
the boy with a playground and reading
room, where he might spend his hours of
idleness and restlessness, and through which
his temptations to petty crime might be
averted. A man who is grateful to the
alderman who sees that his gambling and
racing are not interfered with, might learn
to feel loyal and responsible to the city
which supplied him with a gymnasium and
swimming tank where manly and well-con-
ducted sports are possible. The voter who
is eager to serve the alderman at all times,
because the tenure of his job is dependent
upon aldermanic favor, might find great
relief and pleasure in working for the city
in which his place was secured by a well-
administered civil service law.
After all, what the corrupt alderman
demands from his followers and largely
depends upon is a sense of loyalty, a
standing-by the man who is good to you,
who understands you, and who gets you
267
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
out of trouble. All the social life of the
voter from the time he was a little boy
and played " craps " with his " own push,"
and not with some other "push," has been
founded on this sense of loyalty and of
standing in with his friends. Now that
he is a man, he likes the sense of being
inside a political organization, of being
trusted with political gossip, of belonging
to a set of fellows who understand things,
and whose interests are being cared for
by a strong friend ih the city council itself.
All this is perfectly legitimate, and all in
the line of the development of a strong
civic loyalty, if it were merely socialized
and enlarged. Such a voter has already
proceeded in the forward direction in so
far as he has lost the sense of isolation,
and has abandoned the conviction that
city government does not touch his indi-
vidual affairs. Even Mill claims that the
social feelings of man, his desire to be at
unity with his fellow-creatures, are the
natural basis for morality, and he defines
268
POLITICAL REFORM
a man of high moral culture as one who
thinks of himself, not as an isolated indi-
vidual, but as a part in a social organism^j
Upon this foundation it ought not to be
difficult to build a structure of civic virtue.
It is only necessary to make it clear to the
voter that his individual needs are com-
mon needs, that is, public needs, and that
they can only be legitimately supplied for
him when they are supplied for all. If we
believe that the individual struggle for life
may widen into a struggle for the lives of
all, surely the demand of an individual for
decency and comfort, for a chance to work
and obtain the fulness of life may be wid-
ened until it gradually embraces all the
members of the community, and rises into
a sense of the common weal.
In order, however, to give him a sense
of conviction that his individual needs
must be merged into the needs of the
many, and are only important as they are
thus merged, the appeal cannot be made
along the line of self-interest. The de-
269
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
mand should be universalized; in this pro-
cess it would also become clarified, and the
basis of our political organization become
perforce social and ethical.
Would it be dangerous to conclude that
the corrupt politician himself, because he
is democratic in method, is on a more
ethical line of social development than the
reformer, who believes that the people must
be made over by " good citizens " and gov-
erned by " experts " ? The former at least
are engaged in that great moral efl'ort of
getting the mass to express itself, and of
adding this mass energy and wisdom to
the community as a whole.
The wide divergence of experience makes
it difficult for the good citizen to under-
stand this point of view, and many things
conspire to make it hard for him to act upon
it. He is more or less a victim to that curi-
ous feeling so often possessed by the good
man, that the righteous do not need to be
agreeable, that their goodness alone is suffi-
cient, and that they can leave the arts and
270
POLITICAL REFORM
wiles of securing popular favor to the self-
seeking. This results in a certain repellent
manner, commonly regarded as the apparel
of righteousness, and is further responsible
for the fatal mistake of making the sur-
roundings of "good influences" singularly
unattractive ; a mistake which really de-
serves a reprimand quite as severe as the
equally reprehensible deed of making the
surroundings of "evil influences" so be-
guiling. Both are akin to that state of
mind which narrows the entrance into a
wider morality to the eye of a needle, and
accounts for the fact that new moral move-
ments have ever and again been inaugu-
rated by those who have found themselves
in revolt against the conventionalized good.
The success of the reforming politician
who insists upon mere purity of admin-
istration and upon the control and sup-
pression of the unruly elements in the
community, may be the easy result of a
narrowing and selfish process. For the
painful condition of endeavoring to minister
271
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
to genuine social needs, through the politi-
cal machinery, and at the same time to
remodel that machinery so that it shall
be adequate to its new task, is to encounter
the inevitable discomfort of a transition into
a new type of democratic relation. The
perplexing experiences of the actual admin-
istration, however, have a genuine value of
their own. The economist who treats the
individual cases as mere data, and the social
reformer who labors to make such cases
impossible, solely because of the appeal to
his reason, may have to share these
perplexifies before they feel themselves
within the grasp of a principle of growth,
working outward from within ; before they
can gain the exhilaration and uplift which
comes when the individual sympathy and
intelligence is caught into the forward
intuitive movement of the mass. This
general movement is not without its in-
tellectual aspects, but it has to be trans-
ferred from the region of perception to
that of emotion before it is really appre-
272
POLITICAL REFORM
hended. The mass of men seldom move
together without an emotional incentive.
The man who chooses to stand aside, avoids
much of the perplexity, but at the same
time he loses contact with a great source
of vitality.
Perhaps the last and greatest difficulty in
the paths of those who are attempting to
define and attain a social morality, is that
which arises from the fact that they cannot
adequately test the value of their efforts,
cannot indeed be sure of their motives until
their efforts are reduced to action and are
presented in some workable form of social*
conduct or control. For action is indeed
the sole medium of expression for ethics.
We continually forget that the sphere of
morals is the sphere of action, that specula-
tion in regard to morality is but observation
and must remain in the sphere of intellect-
ual comment, that a situation does not really
become moral until we are confronted with
the question of what shall be done in a
concrete case, and are obliged to act upon
T 273
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
our theory. A stirring appeal has lately
been made by a recognized ethical lecturer
who has declared that " It is insanity to
expect to receive the data of wisdom by
looking on. We arrive at moral knowledge
only by tentative and observant practice.
We learn how to apply the new insight
by having attempted to apply the old and
having found it to fail."
This necessity of reducing the experiment
to action throws out of the undertaking all
timid and irresolute persons, more than that,
all those who shrink before the need of striv-
ing forward shoulder to shoulder with the
cruder men, whose sole virtue may be social
effort, and even that not untainted by self-
seeking, who are indeed pushing forward so-
cial morality, but who are doing it irrationally
and emotionally, and often at the expense of
the well-settled standards of morality.
The power to distinguish between the
genuine effort and the adventitious mistakes
is perhaps the most difficult test which
comes to our fallible intelligence. In the
274
POLITICAL REFORM
range of individual morals, we have learned
to distrust him who would reach spirituality
by simply renouncing the world, or by
merely speculating upon its evils. The
result, as well as the process of virtues
attained by repression, has become distaste-
ful to us. When the entire moral energy
of an individual goes into the cultivation
of personal integrity, we all know how
unlovely the result may become ; the char-
acter is upright, of course, but too coated
over with the result of its own endeavor to
be attractive. In this effort toward a higher
morality in our social relations, we must
demand that the individual shall be willing
to lose the sense of personal achievement,
and shall be content to realize his activity
only in connection with the activity of the^
many.
The cry of " Back to the people " is al-
ways heard at the same time, when we have
the prophet's demand for repentance or
the religious cry of " Back to Christ," as
though we would seek refuge with our fel-
275
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS
lows and believe in our common experiences
as a preparation for a new moral struggle.
As the acceptance of democracy brings a
certain life-giving power, so it has its own
sanctions and comforts. Perhaps the most
obvious one is the curious sense which
comes to us from time to time, that we
belong to the whole, that a certain basic
well being can never be taken away from
us whatever the turn of fortune. Tolstoy
has portrayed the experience in " Master
and Man." The former saves his servant
from freezing, by protecting him with the
heat of his body, and his dying hours are
filled with an ineffable sense of healing and
well-being. Such experiences, of which we
have all had glimpses, anticipate in our
relation to the living that peace of mind
which envelopes us when we meditate upon
the great multitude of the dead. It is akin
to the assurance that the dead understand,
because they have entered into the Great
Experience, and therefore must comprehend
all lesser ones ; that all the misunderstand-
276
POLITICAL REFORM
ings we have in life are due to partial
experience, and all life's fretting comes of
our limited intelligence; when the last and
Great Experience comes, it is, perforce,
attended by mercy and forgiveness. Con-
sciously to accept Democracy and its
manifold experiences is to anticipate that
peace and freedom.
211
>53 6^ ^S -^Vw, J?^^-^
INDEX
Alderman, basis of his political suc-
cess, 226, 228, 240, 243, 248, 267;
his influence on morals of the
American boy, 251, 255, 256 ; on
standard of life, 257 ; his power,
232, 233, 235, 246, 260 ; his social
duties, 234, 236, 243, 250.
Art and the workingman, 219, 225.
" Boss," the, ignorant man's de-
pendence on, 260, 266.
Business college, the, 197.
Charity, administration of, 14, 22;
neighborly relations in, 29, 230;
organized, 25 ; standards in, 15,
27, 32, 38, 49, 58 ; scientific vs.
human relations in, 64.
Child labor, premature work, 41,
188; first laws concerning, 167,
170.
City, responsibilities of, 266.
Civil service law, its enforcement,
231. 233.
Commercial and industrial life,
social position of, compared, 193.
Commercialism and education,
190-199, 216; morals captured
by, 264; polytechnic schools
taken by, 202.
Cooperation, 153, 158.
Cooper, Peter, 202.
Dayton, Ohio, factory at, 216.
Death and burials among simple
people, 238.
Domestic service, problem of, in
France, England, and America,
135; industrial difficulty of,
106 ; moral issues of, 106.
Education, attempts at industrial,
201 ; commercialism in, 196,
201 ; in commercialism, 216 ; in
technical schools, 201; lack of
adaptation in, 199, 208, 212; of
industrial workers, 180, 193, 199,
219; offset to overspecialization,
211 ; public school and, 190, 192 ;
relation of, to the child, 180, 185,
193 ; relation of, to the immigrant,
1 81-186; university extension
lectures and settlements, 199;
workingmen's lecture courses,
214.
Educators, mistakes of, 212; new
demands on, 178, 192, 201, 211.
Family claim, the, 4, 74, 78 ; daugh-
ter's college education, 82; em-
ployer's vs. domestic's, 123, 124;
on the daughter, 82; on the son,
idid.
Family life, misconception of, 116.
Filial relations, clash of moral
codes, 94.
Funerals, attitude of simple people
toward, 238.
Household employee, the, 108, 109;
character of, 112; domestic vs.
1 This index is not intended to be exhaustive.
279
INDEX
factory, Ii6, ii8, 119, 122; isola-
tion of, 109, III, 117, 120, 132;
morals of, 125 ; unnatural rela-
tion of, 113, 120, 121, 126, 127;
unreasonable demands on, 113,
115 ; residence clubs for, 133 ; so-
cial position of, 114, 119, 122.
Household employer, the, undemo-
cratic ethics of, 116; reform of,
in relation to employee, 126.
Household, the, advantages and
disadvantages of factory work
over, 129; competition of factory
work with, 128 ; difficulties of the
small, 135; industrial isolation
of, 117; industry of, transferred
to factory, 104, 105 ; lack of prog-
ress in, 117; origin of, 104; so-
cial vs. individual aspects of,
103; suburban difficulties of,
134; wages in, 131.
Hull-house experiences, 43, 53, 58,
59, 240, 247.
Human life, value of, 7, 178.
Individual action vs. associated,
137, 153, 158 ; advantages of, 158,
162; limitations of, 165; moral
evolution involved in, 226.
Individual vs. social needs, 155, 269.
Individual vs. social virtues, 224,
227, 265.
Italian immigrant, the, conception
of abstract virtue among, 229 ;
dependence of, on their children,
184 ; education of, 185 ; new con-
ditions of life of, 181.
Juvenile criminal, the, evolution of,
53-56, 187.
Labor, division of, 210, 213; re-
action from, 215.
Law and order, 172, 174, 234.
Moral fact and moral idea, 227,
229, 273.
Morality, natural basis of, 268;
personal and social, 6, 176, 103.
Philanthropic standpoint, the, its
dangers, 150, 155-157-
Philanthropist, the, 154, 175-176.
Political corruption, ethical devel-
opment in, 270; formation of
reform clubs, 246 ; greatest press-
ure of, 260; individual and so-
cial aspect of, 264; leniency in
regard to, 239 ; responsibility for,
256, 263; selling of votes, 244-
246; street railway and saloon
interest, 262.
Political leaders, causes of success
of, 224.
Political standards, 228, 229, 251-
253, 261 ; compared with Ben-
jamin Franklin's, 255.
Referendum method, the, 164.
Reformer, the, ethics of, 270.
Reform movements in politics,
causes of failure in, 222, 240,
262, 272, 274; business men's
attitude toward, 265.
Rumford, Count, 117.
Ruskin, 219.
Saloon, the, 243, 264.
Social claim, the, 4, 77 ; child study
and, 92, 180; misplaced energy
and, 90.
Social virtues, code of employer,
143, 148 ; code of laboring man,
ibid.
Technical schools, 201 ; adaptation
of, to workinginen,204; compro-
mises in, 203; polytechnic insti-
tutions, 202 ; textile schools, 203 ;
women in, ibid.
Thrift, individualism of, 31, 40, 212.
Trades unions, 148, 158, 167, 169,
171 ; sympathetic strikes, 174.
280
INDEX
Workingman, the, ambition of, for
his children, 191, 258 ; art in re-
lation to, 218; charity of, 154;
evening classes and social enter-
tainment for, 189; grievance of.
211 ; historical perspective in the
work of, ibid.; organizations of,
214; standards for political can'
didate, 257.
281
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